North Korea threatens strikes over South propaganda broadcasts

Members of the Korean Disabled Veterans Association by Agent Orange in Vietnam War, shout slogans as they hold up defaced North Korean flags and images of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a rally denouncing North Korea in front of the Unification Bridge near the border village of Panmunjom in Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015. South Korea restarted propaganda broadcasts across the border with rival North Korea on Monday for the first time in 11 years in retaliation for the North allegedly planting land mines last week that maimed two South Korean soldiers. (Photo by Lee Jin-man/AP)

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea on Saturday threatened to attack South Korean loudspeakers that are broadcasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda messages across their shared border, the world’s most heavily armed.

The warning follows Pyongyang’s earlier denial that it had planted land mines on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone that injured two South Korean soldiers last week. Seoul retaliated for those injuries by restarting the loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts for the first time in 11 years and suggested more actions could follow.

The authoritarian North is extremely sensitive about insults of its leader, Kim Jong Un, and tries to isolate its people from any criticism or suggestions that Kim is anything other than powerful and revered.

North Korea’s army said in a statement that the broadcasts are equivalent to a declaration of war and that a failure to immediately stop them and take down the loudspeakers would result in “an all-out military action of justice to blow up all means for ‘anti-north psychological warfare'” on the front lines.

Such bombast isn’t unusual and this is not the first time Pyongyang has threatened to attack its enemies. Seoul is often warned that it will be reduced to a “sea of fire” if it doesn’t do as the North bids, and Washington and Seoul were both threatened with nuclear annihilation in the months after Kim Jong-Un took power in late 2011.

Pyongyang’s threats are rarely backed up, although the North did launch an artillery attack in 2010 that killed four South Koreans. Later that year, a Seoul-led international investigation blamed a North Korean torpedo for a warship sinking that killed 46 South Koreans.

On Friday, responding to the allegations by Seoul and

the US-led UN Command that North Korean soldiers buried the land mines, Pyongyang’s powerful National Defense Commission argued that Seoul fabricated the evidence and demanded video proof to support the argument that Pyongyang was responsible. The explosions resulted in one soldier losing both legs and another soldier one leg.

Officials said the mine planting violates the armistice that stopped fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War, which still technically continues because there has never been a formal peace treaty.