South Korea and the United States kicked off their largest-ever annual joint military exercises on Monday with a special focus on bolstering the allies' wartime capability to launch precision strikes on North Korea's top leadership, officials said Monday.
The Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises, each a command post-based and field training war game, began their weeks-long schedules amid escalating military tensions between South and North Korea following Pyongyang’s nuclear and long-range missile tests earlier this year, according to South Korea’s (Yonhap) News Agency.
The US will also deploy the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74), a nuclear-powered submarine, aerial tanker aircraft and reportedly the B-2 stealth bomber during the annual springtime exercises. From the South Korean side, some 300,000 troops will take part.
Military sources said the exercises will newly incorporate the allies’ recently-signed operational plan, OPLAN 5015, which stipulates allied operations to launch precision attacks on North Korea’s top leadership and its nuclear and missile arsenal in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula.
In response, North Korea threatened to launch an “all-out offensive” against Seoul and Washington. This year’s exercises mobilize some 17,000 U.S. troops, the largest number of American forces in about 40 years and about twice the size of a year earlier, according to military officials here.
“The army and people of the North will take military counteraction for preemptive attack so that they may deal merciless deadly blows at the enemies,” the North’s powerful National Defense Commission said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The commission also warned that major South Korean targets are within the North’s firing range, and its nuclear strike capability can reach U.S. military bases in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the U.S. mainland.
“If we push the buttons to annihilate the enemies even right now, all bases of provocations will be reduced to seas in flames and ashes in a moment,” the commission said.
South Korea immediately hit back at the threats. “North Korea should stop its brash, self-destructive comments and actions right now,” spokesman of the South Korean Ministry of National Defense Moon Sang-gyun, said in a briefing Seoul.
“If they launch provocations in defiance, South Korea will respond resolutely and mercilessly,” the spokesman said.
The North claims the joint military drills are a rehearsal for a nuclear war against it. Seoul and Washington have said such exercises are purely defensive in nature.
