North Korea threatened Wednesday that its "exercise of the right to self-defense to thoroughly neutralize the enemy's military threats will be expressed through ever clearer actions," directing the warning at the ongoing Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise — even as South Korean and US military authorities move to finalize plans to scale back their combined drills.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) carried the commentary, saying "it is necessary to respond to the increasingly evolving threatening actions of adversaries with new and evolved strength."
KCNA added that "adversaries who infringe upon and threaten the sovereignty and security of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will always remain within the crosshairs of annihilating retaliatory means," and that "all aggression war exercises by hostile states will never bring about the results their organizers desire."
The commentary made no mention of President Donald Trump's recent directive to reduce the scale of the exercises or his conciliatory gestures toward Pyongyang.
Instead, much of the commentary catalogued the content, format and scale of UFS, condemning it as undergoing "dangerous evolution that is different and more perilous each time."
On the UN Command's participation in the drills, KCNA called it "a full-scale start to reviving the combat functions and expanding the role" of the command — a development it said "cannot be overlooked."
The commentary also argued that South Korea's training grounds have become far more than a venue for US-South Korea alliance exercises.
KCNA said the exercises show that "the South Korean yard bordering our state is being transformed not merely into a training ground for the US-South Korea military alliance, but into a gathering point for multinational aggressive forces and a showcase of modern warfare aimed at targeting the security domains of our state and the independent nations of the region."
It further warned that "the already tense situation on the Korean Peninsula is once again reaching a 'critical point' of war outbreak, with the frenzied exercises lasting more than 10 days," adding that "the dangerous expansion and intensification of war exercises poses a graver threat to our republic's security zone and is bound to lead to a further deterioration of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and in the Asia-Pacific region."
rimsclub@heraldcorp.com
