North vows to drop millions of leaflets on the South

SEOUL — North Korea’s printing shops have been working overtime to revive a favorite weapon of Cold Warera psychological warfare: sending millions of propaganda leaflets across the world’s most heavily armed border and scattering them over South Korea.

The titfortat move was announced Monday by the North, which has become incensed by the leaflets that defectors from the North have sent from the South to their Communist home country in recent months, the North’s official news agency said.

The pledge by the North to retaliate presents another threat to the fragile detente on the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea said it was preparing 3,000 balloons to carry the leaflets across the border, along with cigarette butts and other trash. The defectors have continued their propaganda efforts despite protests from Pyongyang and interKorean agreements to stop them.

“The largestever distribution of leaflets against the enemy are almost complete,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported, adding that publishing and printing houses in Pyongyang had printed 12 million leaflets, with those in provinces preparing to print millions more.

“The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near,” it added. “South Korea has to face the music.”

North Korea has been expressing increasingly growing frustration with South Korea and the United States, especially since the second summit between the North’s leader, Kim Jong Un, and President Trump collapsed in Vietnam in February last year.

This month, it seized upon the leaflets sent by activists in South Korea to start reversing the detente, cutting off all communications lines with South Korea and blowing up a joint liaison office it had operated with the South in the past two years.

Leaflets have been a common psychological warfare tool used by both Koreas since the 195053 Korean War. They had agreed to stop such propaganda, including loudspeaker broadcasts along the border, several times since the 1970s. They also tried to reduce their propaganda duel after a landmark summit in 2000 at which they agreed to promote reconciliation. The two Koreas again reached the same agreement when Kim and President Moon Jaein of South Korea met in 2018.