South Korea and the US launched a massive joint military exercise yesterday, prompting the North to condemn the maneuvers as provocative and warn that “all-out war” could erupt.
The two allies have described the 10-day Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise as defensive and routine, but the North habitually terms such joint drills a rehearsal for invasion and launches its own counter-exercises.
“The exercise started this morning,” a spokesman for the US-South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC) said, referring to the annual computer-assisted, command-post simulation exercise.
Photo: AFP
All of CFC’s major units are taking part, involving more than 530,000 troops, including about 3,000 military personnel from the US and other bases around the Pacific region, CFC said.
US General James Thurman, CFC commander, said the drill was focused on “preparing, preventing and prevailing against the full range of current and future external threats” to South Korea and the region.
“We are applying lessons learned out of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as those garnered by the alliance’s recent experiences with North Korean provocations on the peninsula and past exercises,” he said.
Photo: Reuters
Pyongyang condemned the exercise as “extremely provocative,” calling it a preparation for an “all-out war” against the North and the “largest-ever nuclear war exercise.”
“The Korean Peninsula is faced with the worst crisis ever. An all-out war can be triggered by any accidents,” the North’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary.
Seoul and Washington wanted to use the latest exercises to build up their capability to mount surprise attacks on the North’s nuclear and missile facilities, the commentary said.
“The US warmongers are planning to carry out a realistic war drill to remove our nuclear facilities with a mobile unit led by the US 20th Support Command which was sent to Iraq to find and disable weapons of mass destruction,” it said. “Our military and the people will not sit idle as US imperialists mobilize massive military forces and threaten our sovereign rights.”
It accused the US of seeking to bring war to the Korean Peninsula after Afghanistan and Iraq as a way to “extricate itself from its worsening economic crisis.”
The CFC spokesman said that during the exercise, troops would train for a “wide variety of missions including those involving the location and security of chemical, biological, nuclear and radiological threats.”
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