Seoul, Nov. 26: North Korea, after its artillery attack on the South this week, warned on Friday that plans for a US-South Korean naval exercise bring the peninsula “closer to the brink of war”.
The hardline Communist regime had on Tuesday fired shells and rockets at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong, killing four people. It later claimed it was retaliating after South Korea had staged military exercises.
The USS George Washington carrier strike group, based in Japan, was on Friday heading for waters west of the Korean peninsula where the US and South Korea plan four days of naval exercises in the Yellow Sea from Sunday.
US Forces Korea said in a statement on Wednesday the drill had been planned well before North Korea’s “unprovoked artillery attack” but it demonstrated the US “commitment to regional stability through deterrence”.
Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, in an article on Friday on the planned war games, attacked “the US imperialists and South Korean puppet war-like forces” for what it called an exercise in “sabre-rattling.”
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is inching closer to the brink of war due to the reckless plan of those trigger-happy elements to stage again the war exercises targeted against the DPRK,” it said, using the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.