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| On the opening day of the Ulchi civil defense exercise, troops engage in a counter-terrorism drill at the National Assembly in Seoul, Aug. 21. Yonhap |
North Korea denounced South Korea and the United States on Tuesday for staging their annual joint military exercise, warning that the drills could trigger an unprecedented "thermonuclear war" on the Korean Peninsula.
The North also accused Seoul, Washington and Tokyo of holding their trilateral summit at Camp David last week to adopt a series of documents to "detail, plan and formulate" nuclear war provocations, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a commentary.
"An unprecedented large-scale thermonuclear war is approaching the Korean Peninsula every moment as reality," the KCNA said in an English language report, adding that the allies' military drills are "aggressive" in nature, likely involving U.S. nuclear strategic assets.
The annual Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise, based on an all-out war scenario, began its 11-day run of various contingency drills Monday, such as the computer simulation-based command post exercise, concurrent field training and Ulchi civil defense drills. The North has long denounced Seoul-Washington military drills as a rehearsal for an invasion.
N. Korea intends to launch satellite between Aug. 24 and 31: Kyodo 2023-08-22 08:22 | North Korea
In its first response to the Camp David summit, the secretive regime said South Korea and the U.S. are staging the military drills to implement the summit agreements "even before the ink of agreed documents is dry."
"If the agreements fabricated at the Camp David Resort are additionally put into practice in the war drill... the possibility of outbreak of a thermonuclear war on the Korean peninsula will become more realistic," the KCNA said.
The leaders of South Korea, the U.S. and Japan held a trilateral summit at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland on Friday and agreed to cooperate closely for stronger missile defense against North Korea.
In particular, they agreed to consult one another in the event of common threats amid the security and economic challenges posed by North Korea and China.
"The will to punish the hostile forces threatening the sovereignty of our state and the right to existence of our people for decades is waiting for a moment of percussion," the report said, warning that North Korea's armed forces "will wait for the time." (Yonhap)
