North Korea warns region is on brink of war
YEONPYEONG ISLAND, SOUTH KOREA (AP) — North Korea warned Friday that U.S.-South Korean plans for military maneuvers put the peninsula on the brink of war, and appeared to launch its own artillery drills within sight of an island it showered with a deadly barrage this week. The fresh artillery blasts were especially defiant because they came as the U.S. commander in South Korea, General Walter Sharp, toured the South Korean island to survey damage from Tuesday’s hail of North Korean artillery fire that killed four people. None of the latest rounds hit the South’s territory, and U.S. military officials said Sharp did not even hear the concussions, though residents on other parts of the island panicked and ran back to the air raid shelters where they huddled earlier in the week as white smoke rose from North Korean territory . . . As Washington and Seoul pressed China to use its influence on Pyongyang to ease tensions amid worries of all-out war, the U.S. prepared to send a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to South Korean waters for joint military drills starting Sunday. The North, which sees the drills as a major military provocation, unleashed its anger over the planned exercises in a dispatch earlier Friday. “The situation on the Korean peninsula is inching closer to the brink of war,” the report in the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said. A North Korean official boasted that Pyongyang’s military “precisely aimed and hit the enemy artillery base” as punishment for South Korean military drills – a reference to Tuesday’s attack – and warned of another “shower of dreadful fire,” KCNA reported in a separate dispatch …
Super-Silent Jimmy Carter Ready to Spy on North Korea
It’s not the diplomacy-minded former president who is ready to spy, it’s the secretive nuclear submarine named for him. The surveillance and attack capabilities it’s supposed to have could keep the tense situation on the Korean peninsula from spiraling out of control. In the wake of [the] North Korean artillery barrage against a South Korean island, the U.S.S. George Washington is sailing to South Korea to participate in joint exercises. A statement from the Navy’s Seventh Fleet, which patrols the western Pacific, says the drill was planned before the “unprovoked” North Korean attack, but will demonstrate “the strength of the [South Korea]-U.S. Alliance and our commitment to regional stability through deterrence.” In other words: to stave off another attack, not to initiate a retaliation . . . The Navy doesn’t say much about what the Jimmy Carter can do, but the consensus is that it’s used for “highly classified missions.” Reportedly, it can tap undersea fiber-optic cables, potentially intercepting North Korean commands … [emphasis added]
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