PYONGYANG, North Korea
North Korea said Thursday it will deploy new military hardware along the military demarcation line that separates it from the South after Seoul partially pulled back from a 2018 agreement designed to ease tensions along the border, state-run media reported.
North Korea acted after Seoul
vowed to increase its intelligence and surveillance along the demilitarized
zone (DMZ) in response to the launch of North Korea’s first-ever spy
satellite on Tuesday, which analysts said could give Pyongyang information
to better target opponents’ forces.
The reactive move by
Seoul represents a partial retreat from the Inter-Korean Military
Agreement, which was signed in 2018 as part of efforts with the US to
contain the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula – and broaden the buffer zone
between the two Koreas.
It was signed by then-South
Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Panmunjom
on the border, with the text declaring “there will be no more war on the Korean
Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.”
But any goodwill generated by
the agreement has evaporated in recent years. Kim, who did not get the
concessions he wanted from the US and South Korea during subsequent talks, has
since ramped up the North’s ballistic missile program, pledging to give Pyongyang
a nuclear deterrent like that possessed by Washington.
In response to the North
Korean buildup, the US and South Korea – along with Japan –
have stepped-up their military cooperation via exercises and deployments
that Pyongyang sees as a threat.
Earlier this week
North Korea denounced the US for its potential sales of advanced
missiles to Japan and military equipment to South Korea, calling it “a
dangerous act” in a report from KCNA.
North Korea said it
was “obvious” who the offensive military equipment would be aimed at and used
against.
On Thursday North Korea’s
Defense Ministry said that its army will “never be bound” by the military
agreement, vowing to deploy “more powerful armed forces and new-type military
hardware in the region along the Military Demarcation Line,” according to KCNA.
It claimed that the agreement
has “long been reduced to a mere scrap of paper owing to the intentional and
provocative moves” of South Korea, and warned that it must “pay dearly” for its
“irresponsible and grave political and military provocations that have pushed
the present situation to an uncontrollable phase,” KCNA said.
Pyongyang also said that South
Korea will be held “wholly accountable” for clashes that may break out between
the two Koreas.
“The most dangerous situation
in the area of the military demarcation line, where the world’s most acute
military confrontation lingers and any slight accidental factor may aggravate
an armed conflict to an all-out war, has become irreversibly uncontrollable,
due to the serious mistake made by the political and military gangsters of the
‘ROK [Republic of Korea],’” KCNA said.
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