North Korea said on Thursday, November 22, it was suspending a five-year-old accord reached with South Korea to reduce military tensions – the latest retaliatory fallout over Pyongyang's spy satellite launch.
The angry statement from the nuclear-armed North's defense ministry came after state media claimed leader Kim Jong Un was already reviewing images of US military bases in Guam sent by Pyongyang's new eye in the sky.
With the United States leading allies in slamming Tuesday's satellite launch as a "brazen violation" of UN sanctions, the South moved Wednesday to partially suspend the 2018 deal, a series of measures put in place to cool tensions on the Korean peninsula.
On Thursday the North said it was ripping up the agreement entirely. "We will withdraw the military steps, taken to prevent military tension and conflict in all spheres including ground, sea and air, and deploy more powerful armed forces and new-type military hardware in the region along the Military Demarcation Line," the ministry said, according to state-run KCNA news agency. The ministry said it "will never be bound" by the deal again, according to KCNA.
Ballistic missile
Seoul also said North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the sea but the launch likely failed Wednesday night, hours after South Korea said it would resume front-line aerial surveillance in response to the North’s spy satellite launch.
Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have slammed the sanctions-busting launch of the Malligyong-1 satellite, which KCNA images showed was watched by a smiling Kim. It was Pyongyang's third attempt this year to put a satellite into orbit, and the first since Kim met President Vladimir Putin at a Russian cosmodrome in September.
Seoul's military said the satellite had entered orbit, but warned it was too early to tell if it was working. The North's defense ministry repeated Thursday that the satellite launch was part of its "right to self-defense", and dismissed the "extremely hysterical" response from the South in particular.