Seoul, Sep 2 (EFE).- North Korea launched several cruise missiles into the Yellow Sea on Saturday, two days after Seoul and Washington concluded large-scale joint maneuvers, the South Korean military announced.
The launch took place around 4 am, according to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), which did not provide further details of the latest weapons test from Pyongyang.
“While strengthening our monitoring and vigilance, our military is maintaining a full readiness posture in close cooperation with the United States,” the JCS said in a statement, local news agency Yonhap reported.
South Korea and the United States on Thursday concluded their joint Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercises, which the North views as an invasion rehearsal and has warned could end up resulting in a “thermonuclear war.”
In response to the joint drills, North Korea announced on Thursday that it had conducted a military command post exercise that was supervised by the leader Kim Jong-un and simulated the seizure of South Korean territory.
A day earlier, Pyongyang launched two short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs) into the Sea of Japan (called the East Sea in the two Koreas), hours after Washington mobilized a B-1 strategic bomber to take part in the UFS exercises.
Following the failure of the denuclearization dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang in 2019, the Korean peninsula has once again become the scene of a persistent military escalation, with the Kim Jong-un regime repeatedly testing missiles and the allies carrying out large-scale exercises and the US regularly deploying strategic assets.
In March, Pyongyang announced that it had fired strategic cruise missiles equipped with a warhead that simulated a nuclear attack against South Korea.
The “Hwasal-1” and “Hwasal-2” type missiles hit targets marked in the Sea of Japan, according to the regime. EFE
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