N. Korea ramps up provocative rhetoric
Warns US against ‘aerial espionage’
North Korea threatened military action against American spy planes operating off the country’s east coast, its state media reported Tuesday, as a US submarine capable of shooting nuclear ballistic missiles planned to visit South Korea for the first time in four decades.
The North has often bristled at US military reconnaissance around the Korean Peninsula. But since Monday, it has issued three consecutive statements threatening retaliation against what it called “provocative aerial espionage” by American spy planes and drones.
On Monday, the North’s Ministry of National Defense accused a US reconnaissance plane of illegally intruding into its “inviolable airspace” off its east coast this month.
“There is no guarantee that such shocking accident as downing of the US Air Force strategic reconnaissance plane will not happen,” it said, according to an English-language dispatch from the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
In two separate statements issued later Monday and early Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of and spokeswoman for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, also said that US reconnaissance planes committed “a grave encroachment upon the sovereignty and security” of her country by flying over its 200-nautical mile economic water zone.
She warned that a “shocking” or “critical” incident would occur if such illegal intrusions continued.
To drive home the threat, North Korea cited a 1969 incident in which it shot down an American EC-121 reconnaissance aircraft, killing all 31 people aboard.
Both the Pentagon and the South Korean military dismissed the North Korean statements as baseless accusations. But officials and analysts in the region fear that North’ Korea’s escalating rhetoric might lead to military provocations.
“We always operate responsibly and safely and in accordance with international law, so those accusations are just accusations,” Sabrina Singh, a deputy Pentagon press secretary, said Monday. Matthew Miller, a US State Department spokesman, urged North Korea to refrain from escalatory actions.
A country can claim the right to exploit marine resources in its so-called exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles from its 12 nauticalmile territorial waters. But it does not hold sovereignty over the zone’s surface and the airspace above it.
South Korea also pushed back against the outbursts coming from the North.
“North Korea makes these claims for internal purposes and maybe to build an excuse to launch provocations,” Colonel Lee Sung-jun, a South Korean military spokesman, said Tuesday.