Nuclear-Armed North Korea Issues New Threat

Pyongyang issued a strongly-worded warning on Monday through its supreme leader’s powerful sister, after North Korea sent hundreds of trash-carrying balloons into the South’s airspace and Seoul responded by resuming propaganda broadcasts at the border.

South Korea said the number of balloons detected in its territory now numbered more than 1,600 since May 28, including 310 over the weekend, according to its Joint Chiefs of Staff. An air raid notice pushed to mobile devices in Seoul late on Sunday urged residents not to touch the falling objects, which local reports said were discovered downtown.

Kim Yo Jong, 36, the younger sister of Kim Jong Un, said the move—involving a purported 1,400 balloons carrying 7.5 tons of waste—was in retaliation for the scattering of “despicable political agitation rubbish,” referring to anti-North Korea leaflets sent last week by rights activists and defectors in the South.

The South Korean government’s decision to restart loudspeaker broadcasts—not used since 2018—was “a prelude to a very dangerous situation,” she said, according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

“If the ROK simultaneously carries out the leaflet scattering and loudspeaker broadcasting provocation over the border, it will undoubtedly witness the new counteraction of the DPRK,” Kim Yo Jong said, using the official names of the Republic of Korea in the South and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the North.

Kim Yo Jong, the spokesperson for North Korea’s long-ruling Workers’ Party, did not elaborate on the future countermeasures, but suggested the regime’s reaction so far had been restrained.

South Korea’s military on Monday reported signs that the North was installing its own loudspeakers in the region.

Inter-Korean relations have spiraled further since peace talks collapsed in 2019 while both Seoul and Washington were under different administrations.

In May alone, North Korea attempted a spy satellite launch, sent trash-carrying balloons across the Demilitarized Zone and fired 18 ballistic missiles into its eastern seas. The South fully suspended a 2018 agreement meant to curb tensions at the DMZ and restarted all military activities near the border.

The turning point came at the start of the year, when Kim Jong Un defined North-South relations as those between “hostile states,” dismissing any chance of unification on the Korean Peninsula. His forces have fortified positions at the border and destroyed symbols of past reconciliation efforts.

South Korea’s embassy in Washington, D.C., and the North’s embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to separate requests for comment.

South Korea’s military said that no toxic substances had been discovered in the North’s balloons, which mostly contained paper and plastic. Some balloons contained “human waste,” Yonhap News TV said, but no damage to life or property has been reported.

Yoon Hee-geun, South Korea’s police commissioner, said on Monday that the government had “no legal basis” to intervene in the distribution by activists of anti-North propaganda, which Kim Yo Jong called “intemperate psychological warfare.”

Late on Sunday, South Korean authorities used loudspeakers to broadcast the country’s national anthem in a Cold War-era tactic that included songs by K-pop band BTS.

The United States is treaty-bound to defend South Korea from an armed attack. The State Department did not immediately respond to a written request for comment after hours.

Pranay Vaddi, the U.S.’s top nonproliferation official on the White House’s National Security Council, said recently that China, Russia and North Korea were “all expanding and diversifying their nuclear arsenals at a breakneck pace.”

“Absent a change in adversary arsenals, we may reach a point in the coming years where an increase from current deployed numbers is required. We need to be fully prepared to execute if the president makes that decision,” he told the Arms Control Association on Friday.

Researchers at the Federation of American Scientists estimate North Korea has 50 warheads in its nuclear stockpile, compared to 500 in China, 5,580 in Russia and 5,044 in the United States.

“The United States is still reducing its nuclear stockpile slowly,” the group said in March. “But China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their stockpiles.”