North Korea vowed yesterday to respond with “powerful nuclear deterrence” to joint US and South Korean military exercises poised to begin this weekend, saying the drills amount to a provocation that would prompt “retaliatory sacred war.”
North Korea routinely threatens war when South Korea and the US hold joint military drills, which Pyongyang sees as a rehearsal for an attack on the communist North. The latest threat comes amid increased tensions on the divided peninsula over the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship that Seoul and Washington blame on Pyongyang.
The allies’ defense chiefs announced earlier in the week they would stage the drills to send a clear message to North Korea to stop its “aggressive” behavior. Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in the March sinking of the Cheonan, considered the worst military attack on the South since the 1950-1953 Korean War.
North Korea vehemently denies any involvement and says any punishment would trigger war.
Yesterday, North Korea’s powerful National Defense Commission — headed by leader Kim Jong-il — backed that threat up by promising a “retaliatory sacred war” against South Korea and the US for what it called a second “unpardonable” provocation after wrongly accusing the North in the Cheonan incident.
“The army and people of the [North] will legitimately counter with their powerful nuclear deterrence the largest-ever nuclear war exercises,” the commission said in a statement carried by the country’s Korean Central News Agency.
A day earlier in Hanoi, a North Korean spokesman for the delegation attending a regional security conference warned the drills would draw a “physical response” from Pyongyang.
South Korea’s Defense Ministry said no unusual North Korean military movements were detected.
The USS George Washington supercarrier is already docked in the South Korean port of Busan for the military games set to begin today.
“The more desperately the US imperialists brandish their nukes and the more zealously their lackeys follow them, the more rapidly the [North’s] nuclear deterrence will be bolstered up along the orbit of self-defense and the more remote the prospect for the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will be become,” the commission statement said.
The US-South Korean military drills are to set to run through Wednesday, with about 8,000 US and South Korean troops on some 20 ships and submarines carrying out exercises in the East Sea.
The drills also involve some 200 aircraft, headlined by four of the US Air Force’s F-22 “Raptor” stealth fighters.
US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced on Wednesday, after visiting the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two Koreas, that the US would slap new sanctions on the North to stifle its nuclear ambitions and punish it for the Cheonan sinking.
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