N. Korea Threatens to Strike S. Korea Warships near Sea Border
North Korea threatened Wednesday to launch an attack on South Korean warships without warning if there was even a "trifling" provocation near their disputed Yellow Sea border.
A South Korean naval ship fired warning shots Tuesday after three North Korean patrol boats crossed the sea boundary.
On Wednesday the North's military accused South Korea of "an intentional grave provocation" at a time when North Korean vessels had been chasing Chinese boats fishing illegally in the area.
In future South Korean naval vessels near the border would be the target of "precision" strikes without warning if they were involved in "any trifling provocations," it said in a statement on the official KCNA news agency.
"We are willing to go for a showdown right now if the puppet rogue is desperate to stand face-to-face with us," it said.
It is not uncommon for North Korean patrol boats and fishing boats to cross the sea border into the South.
Two North Korean patrol boats violated the sea border last month, just before U.S. President Barack Obama arrived in Seoul for a two-day visit.
The North does not recognize the Yellow Sea border, the scene of brief but bloody naval clashes in 1999, 2002 and 2009.
In March the North fired hundreds of shells in a live exercise near the sea boundary. About 100 shells dropped into South Korean territorial waters, and the South responded with volleys of shells into North Korean waters.
21 May 2014, 18:39
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People in France have a superstitious fear of maps. If they would hire a foreigner to look at a map of the sea boundary off the west coast of the Korean peninsula, they would discover that the US drew this boundary after its time of fighting on the peninsula 1950-3 to award the south some islands properly belonging to the north, by taking that boundary line away from a linear extension of the land border into a crooked and contorted line reaching up the coastline towards the north. The south has heavily militarized these islands, making clear to the world that being reasonable is not a legal value in the south. How far has South Korea's elite come from its days of being anti-democratic collaborators with the Japanese invaders?
