The South Korean army announced that it had deployed stealth planes on Friday, after detecting 180 North Korean fighter jets, a new episode in the spectacular rise in tensions in recent days on the Korean peninsula where Seoul and Washington are conducting joint military exercises. . “Our military detected about 180 North Korean fighter jets” mobilized in Pyongyang airspace, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said, adding that they had “deployed 80 fighter jets, including F-35As”. Planes mobilized for military exercises with the United States are also “ready” to take off, according to the same source.
Hundreds of warplanes…
These joint aerial exercises were extended until Saturday after North Korea apparently failed to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Thursday morning. They are among the largest ever made, with hundreds of warplanes involved on both sides. Pyongyang said extending the drills was “a very dangerous and wrong choice” and fired three short-range ballistic missiles late Thursday. Shortly after the announcement, as of 11:28 p.m. local time on Thursday, the Seoul military detected around 80 artillery fire from the North in a maritime “buffer zone” from the Kumkang area of Kangwon province on the coast. East of the country.
The barrage is “a clear violation” of the 2018 inter-Korean agreement which established these buffer zones to reduce tensions between the two sides, the South Korean general staff said. The United States denounced “the illegal and destabilizing firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile”. Seoul and Washington have vowed to take further steps to demonstrate their “resolve and capabilities” in the face of growing threats from the North. Pyongyang fired around 30 missiles on Wednesday and Thursday, including one that ended its course near southern territorial waters for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953. South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said that it was a “de facto territorial invasion”.
…including advanced F-35A and F-35B stealth aircraft
Pyongyang’s provocations, “especially during our period of national mourning, are against humanity and humanism,” Lee Hyo-jung, a deputy spokesperson for Seoul’s Unification Ministry, argued on Friday. a reference to the stampede that killed 156 people in Seoul during Halloween. “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,” she added. She attributed the rise in tensions to Pyongyang’s “reckless nuclear and missile development”.
Called “Vigilant Storm”, the South Korean American exercises constitute “an aggressive and provocative military maneuver targeting the People’s and Democratic Republic of Korea”, denounced on Wednesday for its part the North Korean regime which threatened Seoul and Washington to “pay the most horrible price in history”. North Korea has always viewed US-South Korean military maneuvers as dress rehearsals for an invasion of its territory or an overthrow of its regime.
Analysts attribute Pyongyang’s particularly furious reaction this time around to the use during ‘Vigilant Storm’ of advanced F-35A and F-35B stealth jets, seen as an ideal tool for carrying out ‘decapitation strikes’ flash against North Korean leaders. North Korea had already, in September, 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. If Korea’s nuclear “command and control system” of the North is “endangered by an attack by hostile forces, a nuclear strike will be launched automatically and immediately”, specifies the new doctrine.