Following Pyongyang’s record-breaking barrage of missile tests this week, the South Korean military scrambled stealth jets on Friday after spotting the mobilisation of 180 North Korean warplanes, Seoul reported.
It follows the decision by Seoul and Washington to prolong their largest-ever combined air drills through Saturday, a military exercise that has incensed Pyongyang. It also comes a day after North Korea launched a failed intercontinental ballistic missile test.
Pyongyang launched three more short-range ballistic missiles shortly after South Korea announced its decision to continue the joint exercises on Thursday, describing the move as “a highly dangerous and incorrect option.”
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The South Korean military claimed that hours later, the North fired 80 artillery rounds that landed in a sea “buffer zone.”
According to Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the bombardment constituted a “clear violation” of the 2018 agreement that established the buffer zone in an effort to defuse tensions between the two sides.
The artillery fire came after Pyongyang fired about 30 missiles Wednesday and Thursday, including an intercontinental ballistic missile and one that landed near South Korea’s territorial waters for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described Pyongyang’s ICBM launch as “illegal and destabilizing,” and Seoul and Washington vowed to pursue new measures to demonstrate their “determination and capabilities” against the North’s growing threats.
Experts and officials have said Pyongyang is ramping up its tests in protest over the U.S.-South Korean drills. Washington and Seoul have repeatedly warned that Pyongyang’s recent launches could be a precursor to a nuclear test, which would be its seventh.
Pyongyang has called the joint air drills, dubbed Vigilant Storm, “an aggressive and provocative military drill targeting” North Korea, and threatened that Washington and Seoul would “pay the most horrible price in history” if it continued.
North Korea is particularly sensitive about the air drills, experts say, as its own air force is one of the weakest links in its military, lacking high-tech jets and properly trained pilots.
Seoul last sent fighter jets into action in early October, when it spotted 12 North Korean warplanes performing an apparent air-to-surface fire rehearsal.
The continuing joint exercises involve some of South Korea’s and America’s most modern fighter fighters, the F-35A and F-35B, which are stealth aircraft designed to emit as little radar signature as possible.
