(CNSNews.com) – As annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises began Monday, North Korea fired off fresh belligerent statements and closed the last remaining channel of communication it had with South Korea.
South Korea voiced “regret” over the decision to cut off a military communications channel, the last inter-Korean link operating after Pyongyang earlier closed down others to protest the conservative Lee Myung-bak government’s policies, Seoul’s Yonhap news agency said.
The Foal Eagle and Key Resolve exercises, taking place over a 12-day period, will involve around 50,000 South Korean and U.S. troops, including some stationed in Guam and Hawaii, and simulate troop deployments in the event of a war on the peninsula.
Joint naval maneuvers will involve an aircraft carrier, Aegis-equipped destroyers and an attack submarine.
This year’s exercises come amid new tensions and concerns that North Korea is planning to test a long-range Taepodong-2 ballistic missile with the theoretical capability of reaching Alaska.
North Korea says it is in fact planning to launch a communications satellite into orbit, but when in 1998 it fired a medium-range Taepondong-1 clear across Japan and into the Pacific Ocean, it claimed that that was a satellite launch too.
Japan has since then enhanced its anti-missile defenses, and last week Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada warned that any rocket heading Japan’s way would be shot down.
Japan is equipped with U.S.-supplied SM-3 ballistic missile defense systems, designed to intercept an incoming ballistic missile outside the earth’s atmosphere; the U.S. Navy used the same ship-based system to shoot down a damaged U.S. spy satellite, 130 nautical miles above the Pacific Ocean, in February 2008.
Earlier, U.S. Pacific Command chief Admiral Timothy Keating told ABC News that the U.S. military was “fully prepared to respond as the president directs” to shoot down any ballistic missile launched by North Korea.
As in previous years, Pyongyang has in recent weeks characterized the war games as preparation for an invasion of the North. Last Thursday it went further, threatening South Korean civilian airliners flying through and near North Korean airspace by saying it could not guarantee their safety. Several airlines responded by rerouting flights.
The following day, United Nations Command officers held rare talks with North Korean military officers in the village of Panmunjom on the North-South border, to assure them that the exercises were “purely defensive.”
But on Monday came more threats, starting with a statement that the military command had ordered the armed forces to be “combat ready,” and followed by a warning that any attempt to intercept or shoot down the “satellite” North Korea plans to put into orbit would lead to war.
The military said in a statement that it would launch “prompt counter-strikes by the most powerful military means” against countries trying to intercept the satellite.
“Shooting our satellite … will precisely mean a war,” an army spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Takeo Kawamura responded by urging Pyongyang to exercise restraint, and noting that any launch by North Korea would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions.
The U.S. and its regional allies Japan and South Korea, together with China and Russia, have been involved since 2003 in “six party” negotiations aimed at shutting down North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. The talks have been stalled since last December.