SEOUL — The United States and South Korea began their annual joint military exercises on Monday, while North Korea warned that the drills would deepen tensions on the Korean Peninsula by “throwing fuel onto fire.’’
Both the United States and South Korea insist that the drills are defensive in nature, but North Korea has long condemned the joint exercises as rehearsals for invasion. During such drills, North Korea has often escalated its warlike rhetoric and conducted missile and other weapons tests.
It tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile during the drills in August last year, following it up with a nuclear test, its fifth, the next month.
The exercises this week, known as Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, follow a North Korean threat this month to launch four ballistic missiles into waters near Guam, home to major US military bases in the Western Pacific.
That warning, combined with another by President Trump to bring “fire and fury’’ to the North unless it stood down, has escalated tensions in the region, even setting off fears of possible war.
The tensions appeared to have eased somewhat since the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, said last week that he would “watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees’’ before deciding whether to approve his military’s plan to fire missiles near Guam.
Kim said the United States needed to “make a proper option first and show it through action’’ to reduce tensions.
If North Korea uses the drills this week as a reason to launch missiles around Guam or elsewhere, it could set off a new cycle of escalation.
“We have no intention of raising military tensions on the Korean Peninsula,’’ President Moon Jae-in of South Korea said on Monday during a meeting with his staff. “North Korea should not use this as a pretext for provocation.’’
Moon also stressed his opposition to military action against North Korea to a visiting US congressional delegation.
“Even a very limited military option would eventually lead to an armed clash between South and North Korea,’’ Moon’s office quoted him as telling the delegation, led by Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts. “This would endanger the lives of many foreigners in South Korea, including American servicemen, as well as South Koreans.’’
On Sunday, the North’s main state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, likened the drills to an act of “throwing fuel onto fire’’ that would “worsen the situation.’’
“No one can guarantee that this will not escalate into a real war,’’ it said, calling the annual drills a “rehearsal for nuclear war’’ and the “most naked expression of hostility’’ toward the North.
The war games, which last 11 days, involve some 17,500 US service members, including about 3,000 from outside the peninsula, and 50,000 South Korean troops. The exercises include computer simulations carried out in a large bunker south of Seoul intended to check the allies’ readiness to repel aggressions by the North.
The drills this year are the second Ulchi-Freedom Guardian exercises since the United States and South Korea reportedly revised their war plans in 2015 to reflect the North’s nuclear advances.
It remained unclear whether the drills would involve nuclear-capable long-range bombers and other strategic weapons from the United States. They were not deployed last year.
