The South Korean army announced, Saturday, November 5, the participation in the afternoon of the American B-1B supersonic heavy bomber in the vast air exercises in progress in South Korea, carried out jointly by Seoul and Washington.
“The South Korean and American air forces conducted joint exercises on November 5 [samedi] on the Korean Peninsula with two US Air Force B-1Bs, four South Korean F-35As and four US F-16s”according to a press release from the South Korean general staff published at the end of the maneuvers on Saturday afternoon.
The B-1B is a supersonic bomber that the United States Air Force describes as the “backbone of the American long-range bomber force”. Its deployment in the context of maneuvers with South Korea will be considered as a “significant threat” by North Korea, Ahn Chan-il, an expert on North Korean issues, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
New North Korean missile launches
On the same day, North Korea launched four short-range missiles towards the Yellow Sea, the South Korean military said. The latter detected this launch “from Donglim, North Pyongan Province, to the Western Sea, between 11:32 a.m. and 11:39 a.m. (between 3:32 a.m. and 3:39 a.m. in Paris) », on Saturday, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff explained in a statement, using another name for the Yellow Sea. Their “flight distance was detected at some 130 kilometers, at an altitude of about 20 kilometers and a speed of Mach 5”adds the statement, five times the speed of sound.
aerial exercises “Vigilant Storm” (“watchful storm”), which started on October 31, are the largest ever jointly organized by South Korea and the United States. Initially scheduled until Friday, they have been extended until Saturday after the multiplication, by North Korea, of missile launches in recent days, and in particular the apparently failed launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the direction of from the Sea of Japan.
North Korea has always viewed US and South Korean military maneuvers as dress rehearsals for an invasion of its territory or an overthrow of its rulers.
On Friday evening, the South Korean army had already announced that it had deployed some eighty F-35A stealth aircraft after detecting 180 fighter jets flying in North Korean airspace, a new episode in the spectacular rise in tension in the Korean peninsula in recent weeks.
The United States denounced, on Friday, the repeated firing of missiles by North Korea which “turned into ridicule” the UN Security Council, with the complicity according to them of Russia and China, allies of Pyongyang.