North Korea Plants Mines Near Korean Border Village

“The North has fiercely protested the ongoing Korea-U.S. joint military drills”, Yang Wook, senior researcher at the Korea Defense and Security Forum, said.

Fox News points out that the Ulchi Freedom Guardian Drills, a 12-day exercise that began on Monday, “are largely computer-simulated war games”, involving 25,000 USA troops and 50,000 South Koreans.

North Korea warned Monday that it would launch a preemptive nuclear attack against the US and South Korea if they showed the “slightest sign of aggression” toward Pyongyang while conducting their annual military drills.

The missile was most likely a KN-11 ballistic missile, the US official said.

The North’s hostile acts could be varied: limited military strikes like the torpedoing of the Cheonan corvette and the artillery shelling of Yeonpyeongdo, and terrorist attacks in and outside South Korea, including cyberterrorism and Global Positioning System jamming.

The UN Command issued a statement on Tuesday and said it is aware of the North Korean military’s activity near the bridge.

The secretive nature of North Korea and its nuclear program mean that experts are not entirely sure how well developed Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons are. “Although the North Korean soldiers at the inter-Korean border were selected after a thorough ideology screening, they are increasingly agitated by the South Korean military’s propaganda broadcasts”.

Quoting a survey of North Korean escapees, the ministry noted that economic hardship was the No. 1 factor that drove defectors, but now more North Korean defectors leave the country because they are fed up with the North’s leader Kim Jong-un and its system.

He said the Security Council had previously “unjustifiably ignored” several requests by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – the country’s official name – to put the U.S. South Korea and th. Chinese authorities joined their North Korean counterparts in condemning the US-South Korean war games.

Over the past five years in particular, the Obama administration has repeatedly exploited exercises with South Korea to make a menacing show of force in North East Asia.

South Korean President Park Geun-Hye responded to Pyongyang’s threats by saying, “The North Korean regime has been continuously suppressing its people by its reign of terror while ignoring the livelihood of its people”.

Following that announcement, the Hermit Kingdom fired three ballistic missiles that had a range – between 300 and 360 miles – capable of reaching all of South Korea.

North Korea’s frontline units were “fully ready to mount a preemptive retaliatory strike at all enemy attack groups involved”, said a spokesman for the KPA General Staff.

Kim Sook, a former South Korean ambassador to the United Nations, agreed.

Kiyoshi Odawara, a senior Japanese Foreign Ministry official, told a U.N. Security Council meeting Tuesday on halting the spread of weapons of mass destruction that North Korea’s nuclear test in January and ballistic missile launches – including one on August 3 in which a rocket landed in Japanese waters – pose “clear challenges to the global nonproliferation regime and can not be condoned for any reason”.