SEOUL      -       South Korea’s military scrambled
stealth jets on Friday after detecting the mobilisation of 180 North
Korean warplanes, Seoul said as it
conducted large-scale joint air drills
with the United States which have
infuriated Pyongyang. North Korea has launched a record-breaking
blitz of missile launches this week,
including a failed intercontinental
ballistic missile test on Thursday.
Seoul and Washington extended
their largest-ever joint air drills
through Saturday in response to the
North’s flurry of projectiles.
“Our military detected around
180 North Korean warplanes” mobilised in Pyongyang’s airspace,
Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said,
adding that Seoul “scrambled 80
fighter jets including F-35As” while
jets involved in the joint drills were
also “maintaining readiness”.
Shortly after South Korea announced the decision to extend the
joint drills on Thursday, Pyongyang launched three more shortrange ballistic missiles, calling the
move “a very dangerous and wrong
choice”. Hours later, the North fired
80 artillery rounds that landed in a
maritime “buffer zone”, Seoul’s military said.
The barrage was a “clear violation” of the 2018 agreement that
established the buffer zone in a bid
to reduce tensions between the two
sides, Seoul’s Joints Chiefs of Staff
said. The artillery fire came after
Pyongyang fired about 30 missiles
Wednesday and Thursday, including
an intercontinental ballistic missile
and one that landed near South Korea’s territorial waters for the first
time since the end of the Korean
War in 1953. US Defence Secretary
Lloyd Austin described Pyongyang’s
ICBM launch as “illegal and destabilising”, and Seoul and Washington
vowed to pursue new measures to
demonstrate their “determination
and capabilities” against the North’s
growing threats.
Experts and officials have said
Pyongyang is ramping up its tests
in protest over the US-South Korean
drills. Washington and Seoul have
repeatedly warned that Pyongyang’s
recent launches could be a precursor
to a nuclear test, which would be its
seventh. Pyongyang has called the
joint air drills, dubbed Vigilant Storm,
“an aggressive and provocative military drill targeting” North Korea,
and threatened that Washington and
Seoul would “pay the most horrible
price in history” if it continued.