The situation is a little more tense. This Friday morning, South Korea announced that it had deployed stealth aircraft after detecting the mobilization of 180 North Korean fighter jets. Planes mobilized for ongoing military exercises with the United States are also “ready” to take off, said the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul.
Earlier, on the night of Thursday to Friday, Pyongyang had fired around 80 artillery on a maritime “buffer” zone near its border with the South, according to Seoul. A barrage which represents a “clear violation” of the 2018 inter-Korean agreement, which precisely established these buffer zones in order to reduce tensions between the two parties, said the South Korean general staff.
A reaction to stealth aircraft?
By midweek, North Korea had already fired around 30 missiles, one of which ended its course near southern territorial waters for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Seoul and Washington have extended their joint air exercises, the largest ever, until Saturday. A choice deemed “very dangerous and bad” by Pyongyang, which has always considered that the American-South Korean military maneuvers were dress rehearsals for an invasion of its territory or an overthrow of its regime. Analysts say the exercise’s use of cutting-edge F-35A and F-35B stealth aircraft – seen as an ideal tool for conducting blitz “decapitation strikes” against North Korean leaders – during the exercises would have provoked a particularly furious reaction from North Korea.
“The government strongly condemns North Korea for its continued threats and provocations, based on our annual and defensive drills, raising tensions around the Korean Peninsula,” said Lee Hyo-jung, deputy spokesperson for the Seoul Unification Ministry. She attributed the rise in tensions to Pyongyang’s “reckless nuclear and missile development”. In September, North Korea revised its nuclear doctrine to authorize itself to carry out preventive strikes in the event of an existential threat against the regime of Kim Jong Un.