As South Korea staged with its strategic ally, US, a massive joint military drills on Tuesday, North Korea considered the exercises as provocative, and threatening that "all-out war" could erupt.
As South Korea staged with its strategic ally, US, a massive joint military drills on Tuesday, North Korea considered the exercises as provocative, and threatening that "all-out war" could erupt.
"The exercise started this morning," a spokesman of the US-South Korea Combined Forces Command (CFC) told AFP news agency, referring to the annual computer-assisted simulation command-post exercise.
US General James D. Thurman, Combined Forces Command 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.
“ALL-OUT-WAR”
For its part, 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 communist party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary.
It said that 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 US war-mongers 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 mobilise massive military forces and threaten our sovereign rights."
Pyongyang also accused the United States of seeking to bring war to the Korean peninsula after Afghanistan and Iraq as a way to "extricate itself from its worsening economic crisis".
All of CFC's major units would take part, involving more than 530,000 troops, including some 3,000 military personnel from the United States and other bases around the Pacific region, CFC said.
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".
