In Korea: North retaliates against South with loudspeaker propaganda

It said a failure to take down the speakers would spark ‘an all-out military action of justice to blow up all means for “anti-north psychological warfare” on the front lines’.

The motion will contain “indiscriminate strikes which envisage even potential problem and escalating counteraction”, the assertion stated.

Responding to the claims by Seoul and the US-led United Nations Command that North Korean soldiers buried the landmine explosions, North Korea‘s powerful National Defence Commission argued that Seoul fabricated the evidence and demanded video proof to support the argument that Pyongyang was responsible.

North Korea has bristled at South Korea’s propaganda campaign amid concern that an influx of outside information could pose a threat to its leader Kim Jong-un.

South Korea and the United States kicked off their annual defensive drills dubbed Ulchi Freedom Guardian on Monday.

Seoul’s Unification Ministry, which deals with cross-border affairs, warned earlier this week that a different time zone between North and South Korea posed a number of possible challenges, including for operations at the jointly-run Kaesong industrial complex that lies just inside North Korea.

On Monday, North Korea began its own loudspeaker broadcasts on the eastern part of the border, according to a South Korean Defense Ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of department rules.

Hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides of the border guard the demilitarized zone that bisects the peninsula, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce rather than a peace treaty.

The North has also targeted the US with its verbal broadsides, brandishing its nuclear arsenal with threats of retaliation over Ulchi Freedom.

South Korean officials have expressed concern the move will complicate inter-Korean affairs, particularly movements in and out of the joint industrial complex in North Korea’s border city of Kaesong, according to Yonhap.

This year, a spokesman for North Korea’s National Defense Commission upped the level of threats, as reported by the worldwide Business Times.

“This is about improving alliance capabilities and meeting our security commitments there in the region and on the Korean Peninsula and nothing more than that”, he said.

The North can also “insulate” positive inter-Korean relations from its belligerence against the U.S. during the exercise period, Cha said, adding that inter-Korean ties in 2005 and 2006 remained good despite belligerence against the military exercises.