SEOUL: North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles into the sea and vowed “merciless” retaliation on Monday as the US and South Korea kicked off joint military drills denounced by Pyongyang as recklessly confrontational.
The annual exercises always trigger a surge in military tensions and warlike rhetoric on the divided peninsula, and analysts saw the North’s missile tests as a prelude to a concerted campaign of sabre-rattling.
“If there is a particularly sharp escalation, we could see the North orchestrating some kind of clash on the maritime border,” said Jeung Young-Tae, an analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.
The missile launches came with a stern warning from the nuclear-armed North Korean People’s Army (KPA) that this year’s military drills would bring the peninsula “towards the brink of war”.
The South’s defence ministry said the Scud missiles were fired from the western port city of Nampo and fell into the sea off the east coast — a distance of nearly 500 kilometres.
UN resolutions ban any ballistic missile test by North Korea, and Seoul defence ministry spokesman Kim Min-Seok said Pyongyang appeared intent on triggering a “security crisis”.
“We will respond sternly and strongly to any provocation,” Kim said.
Japan said it had issued a strong protest to the North given the danger such missile launches posed to aviation and shipping, while China urged the two Koreas to exercise restraint.
Missile tests have long been a preferred North Korean method of expressing anger and displeasure with what it views as confrontational behaviour by the South and its allies.
“The situation on the Korean peninsula is again inching close to the brink of a war,” a spokesman for the KPA General Staff was quoted as saying on Monday by the North’s official KCNA news agency.
“The only means to cope
with the aggression and war by the US imperialists and their followers is neither dialogue nor peace. They should be dealt with only by merciless strikes.”
North Korea has threatened attacks, including nuclear strikes, on the US before, although it has never demonstrated a missile capability that would encompass the US mainland.