Following Seoul's partial withdrawal from a 2018 agreement intended to reduce tensions along the border, North Korea announced on Thursday that it would be deploying new military hardware along the military demarcation line that divides it from the South, according to state-run media.
North Korea took action after Seoul promised to step up intelligence and surveillance along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in response to the country's first-ever spy satellite launch on Tuesday. According to analysts, Pyongyang could use this information to more effectively target the forces of its adversaries.
As part of efforts with the US to reduce the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula and expand the buffer zone between the two Koreas, Seoul signed the Inter-Korean Military Agreement in 2018. Still, this reactive move by Seoul amounts to a partial retreat from that agreement.
"There will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun," the document, signed at the border at Panmunjom by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in, stated.
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However, the agreement's goodwill has faded in the last few years. After the US and South Korea failed to grant Kim the concessions he sought during the ensuing negotiations, Kim has since accelerated North Korea's ballistic missile program and promised to provide Pyongyang with a nuclear deterrent comparable to that held by the US.
The US, South Korea, and Japan have increased their military cooperation in response to North Korea's build-up by conducting drills and deployments that Pyongyang views as dangerous.
In a report from KCNA earlier this week, North Korea criticized the US for possibly selling military hardware to South Korea and advanced missiles to Japan, calling it "a dangerous act."
According to North Korea, it was "obvious" who would be the target and adversary of the offensive military hardware.
The Defense Ministry declared that the military agreement will "never be bound" by North Korea's army on Thursday. It also promised to deploy "more powerful armed forces and new-type military hardware in the region along the Military Demarcation Line," according to KCNA.
It claimed that the agreement has “long been reduced to a mere scrap of paper owing to the intentional and provocative moves” of South Korea, and warned that it must “pay dearly” for its “irresponsible and grave political and military provocations that have pushed the present situation to an uncontrollable phase,” KCNA said.
Pyongyang also said that South Korea will be held “wholly accountable” for clashes that may break out between the two Koreas.
“The most dangerous situation in the area of the military demarcation line, where the world’s most acute military confrontation lingers and any slight accidental factor may aggravate an armed conflict to an all-out war, has become irreversibly uncontrollable, due to the serious mistake made by the political and military gangsters of the ‘ROK [Republic of Korea],’” KCNA said.
