SEOUL, South Korea — As tensions surge in the wake of Tuesday’s reconnaissance satellite launch by North Korea, Pyongyang killed off an inter-Korean conflict-prevention mechanism on Thursday.
While the development is not expected to ignite conflict, it is the latest milestone in plummeting relations between North Korea, on the one side, and South Korea and the U.S. on the other.
Adding further complexity is the apparently burgeoning relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow — which South Korean sources accused of supplying North Korea with the technologies that enabled the successful satellite launch.
“We will immediately restore all military measures that have been halted according to the North-South military agreement,” Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in statements monitored in Seoul on Thursday.
With its 1.1-million strong armed forces “no longer bound” by the agreement, the North said it would “deploy more powerful armed forces and new-type military hardware” in the frontier area.
North Korea’s Thursday move follows South Korea’s Wednesday decision to scrap some clauses in the 2018 agreement, relating to no-fly zones in areas adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone. Late Wednesday, North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan.
North Korea’s reaction, Thursday, looks like a fatal blow to the 2018 accord, signed in a period when inter-Korean and Korean-U.S. ties looked – briefly – promising.
The agreement covered a range of issues. They included just no-fly zones, but the halt of artillery drills near the DMZ, the destruction of some guard posts, and demining activities.
The agreement also enabled operations to recover the remains of allied soldiers who had fallen inside what is today the DMZ, but which was the scene of bloody positional combat in the latter stages of the 1950-53 Korean War.
Senior officers have praised the agreement for reducing tensions in the flashpoint border area.
The fate of the agreement marks an acceleration of tit-for-tat measures that follow the arrival of a U.S. Carrier Strike Group in South Korea and the successful placement of a reconnaissance satellite into orbit by North Korea. Both developments took place on Tuesday.
Prior to Tuesday’s success, Pyongyang had undertaken failed launches in May and August. Its fortunes have revived following a September meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin at a dedicated satellite launch center in the Russian Far East.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told a parliamentary briefing in Seoul on Thursday that Russian assistance with satellite technologies had been critical.
“We believe there has been Russia’s help behind the success,” the NIS was quoted as saying by Seoul’s Yonhap News Agency.
There are conflicting opinions on both Tuesday’s satellite launch and the 2018 agreement.
One school of thought has it that spy satellites, by delivering accurate images, may reduce North Korean paranoia, and prevent it from making decisions blind. That could prevent a swiftly spiraling conflict launched on the basis of mistaken information — “Errorgeddon.”
Others argue that eyes in the sky, which can offer accurate target information to Pyongyang’s formidable artillery and missile force, will further embolden Pyongyang.
Critics of the 2018 deal believe that the accord favored North Korea, on the basis that South Korean-U.S. fixed-wing, rotary and drone forces are qualitatively far superior to their adversary’s — but the deal clipped their wings by pushing them back from the border.
Others say that, in fact, North Korea was the loser, as South Korean-U.S. forces field sophisticated intelligence, security and reconnaissance assets that boast far greater range than North Korea’s close-in systems.
Experts say that the death of the deal is a symbolic loss, but no game changer.
“It’s a loss for North Korea, for South Korea and for the people of Northeast Asia as it increases tensions on the Korean peninsula,” said Chun In-bum, a retired general who formerly led South Korea’s Special Warfare Command. “It only favors the hardliners; for those who wanted peace, for those who wanted to find a future solution, their positions are weaker.”
Adding to the risk is the status of cross-border hotlines: North Korea is currently not responding to messages from the South.
Still, the agreement’s end is not necessarily a calamity, given that peninsula relations have been on an accelerating downward slope since 2019, the year a summit between Mr. Kim and then-U.S. President Trump failed.
“In 2018, I supported this: It was a chance to test intentions, to give an opportunity for North and South Korea to build confidence through the measures in the agreement,” said Dan Pinkston, a Seoul-based international relations expert who teaches at Troy University. “But it was not fully implemented and North Korea violated the agreement, so the will to execute it was missing. This is not changing anything.”
Tensions are not expected to ameliorate in the near future.
According to reports in South Korean media, South Korean-U.S. naval drills will take place off the peninsula on Saturday, and Japanese assets will join the exercises on Sunday.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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