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More than 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea to protect against a possible invasion from North Korea. No deaths or injuries have been reported.

North Korea did not return fire but warned Seoul in a letter that it would take military action if the South did not stop the loudspeaker broadcasts along the border within 48 hours, the South’s Defense Ministry said.

The explosions just hundreds of meters into the South’s portion of the inter-Korean Demilitarized Zone left two soldiers in need of leg amputations.

South Korea on Monday ordered border propaganda operations against North Korea to resume for the first time in 11 years, in retaliation for landmine blasts that maimed two of its soldiers during a frontier patrol.

One of the soldiers lost both legs, while the other lost one leg.

The mutual propaganda attacks mark a further deterioration of relations between the two Korean states that have engaged in no serious talks in recent months.

North Korea on Saturday demanded that the South halt anti-North propaganda broadcasts via loudspeakers along the border or face military action, a day after it denied Seoul’s accusation that it planted landmines that wounded two South Korean soldiers.

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.

North Korea threatened Saturday to attack its southern neighbor after activists launched helium balloons carrying anti-Pyongang leaflets.

For more than a century, North Korea has followed Japan’s time zone, which set the local time nine hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time.

According to state news agency KCNA, North Korea will set its clock back by 30 minutes to “Pyongyang time” on August 15.

South Korea has ramped up border security in the wake of the blasts and – after a break of more than a decade – resumed the broadcast of propaganda messages into the North, using batteries of powerful loudspeakers set up at several sites along the border.

South Korean officials said on Monday North Korean intruders planted three land mines on the South Korea side of the demilitarized zone – including one that exploded last Tuesday injuring two soldiers.

A Cheong Wa Dae spokesman said Obama re-invited Park to Washington.

AFP, citing an anonymous source who spoke to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency, says that Choe Yong-gon expressed concern at Kim’s forestry policies.