North Korea condemns US-South Korea joint military drills

ANKARA

North Korea has lambasted the latest joint military drills conducted by the US and South Korea, Yonhap News Agency reported Thursday.

North Korea's Defense Ministry dubbed the drills involving US B-1B and F-16 bombers and South Korean F-35A and F-16 fighter jets over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force Tuesday a "grave provocation."

The exercise was aimed at demonstrating the allies' capabilities to respond to North Korea's "advancing nuclear and missile threats," said South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

Pyongyang also accused Washington and Seoul of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula with the joint military drills, warning that it would deter any aggressive attempts by the allies.

The North's ministry called the deployment a "reckless and unnecessary abuse of strength" and "a grave provocation" that raises regional military tensions to "an extreme dangerous level."

Accusing the US of "openly deploying nuclear submarine, strategic bomber, aircraft carrier and other strategic assets" to the peninsula at a new record level, the ministry said that such deployments have "been fixed as a routine military practice."

The US's "bluffing" military action will "inevitably bring serious negative consequences" to its own security situation, it warned.

North Korea “will exercise the overwhelming deterrence and get the US to realize by itself that the higher the level of provocation against the DPRK is, the greater the level of danger returning to the US will be," the ministry said, using the acronym for the country’s official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The latest South Korea-US exercise marks the third deployment of the US B-1B bomber to or near the Korean Peninsula this year.

*Writing by Aamir Latif