North Korea leaves phone to South Korea off the hook
This follows threats from Pyongyang last week both to end the armistice and to 'exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack.'
This follows threats from Pyongyang last week both to end the armistice and to 'exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack.'
鈥� A daily summary of global reports on security issues.
As the United States and South Korea launched its two-week long "Key Resolve" war games today, North Korea followed through on two of its threatened responses 鈥� cutting off a hotline and "blowing apart" the armistice between North and South.
South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, confirmed this morning that the hotline between Pyongyang and Seoul appears to have been cut off, reports Agence France-Presse. "The North did not answer our call this morning," a ministry official said.
And Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North's ruling Communist Party, wrote Monday that the Korean War armistice, which ended hostilities between North and South but did not entail a formal peace agreement, was at a "complete end."
"With the ceasefire agreement blown apart... no one can predict what will happen from now on," the newspaper wrote.
Neither of today's moves are unexpected, or indeed new. AFP notes that the hotline has been cut off five times since its installation in 1971, most recently in 2010, and that the North has "voided" the armistice nearly a dozen times in the past 20 years, the last time in 2009.
But the moves follow days of hyperbolic language from Pyongyang, which threatened last week both to end the armistice and to "exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors" like the US and South Korea. The threats, made both in response to new United Nations Security Council sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear weapons test last month and in anticipation of today's war games, have increased tensions across the region. And with more than 10,000 South Korean and 3,500 American troops mobilizing for the annual "Key Resolve" simulations, there is concern about accidental escalation.
BBC News reports that there is a heightened sense of concern among portions of the South Korean population, particularly among older South Koreans, due to the newness of both North Korea's recently ascended leader Kim Jong-un and South Korea's President Park Geun-hye, who was sworn in two weeks ago.
"I didn't care about this issue until now," one South Korean told the BBC. "But I do worry this time around. The young North Korean leader is not strong, and I don't trust the new government here in the South."
Ms. Park's new government has been particularly vocal in its threats against the North 鈥� it said it would target the North's top command should any attacks be made against the South 鈥� in what John Delury, a professor of International Studies at Seoul's Yonsei University, told the BBC was a kind of "pre-emptive rhetorical deterrence."
But the Associated Press adds that despite tension over Pyongyang's posturing, there were signs of "business as usual" on Monday.