UK troops join US in Korean war games

BRITISH troops will today link up with the US military for ten days of war games in South Korea.

Around 30 UK servicemen will attend the annual show of strength, which involves some 80,000 troops.

Despite inflamed tensions in recent weeks over North Korea’s continued nuclear missile tests, the Ulchi Freedom Guardian exercise will still go ahead.

Pyongyang has warned the US that it will be ‘pouring gasoline on fire’ if it goes ahead with the games. The communist state said it was ‘reckless behaviour driving the situation into the uncontrollable phase of a nuclear war’.

An editorial carried by the regime’s official newspaper said: ‘The joint exercise is the most explicit expression of hostility against us, and no one can guarantee that the exercise won’t evolve into actual fighting.’ Last year the UK sent 22 servicemen. North Korea also declared that its army can target the US at any time.

It added: ‘If the United States is lost in a fantasy that war on the peninsula is at somebody else’s doorstep far away from them across the Pacific, it is far more mistaken than ever.’