AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News ServiceAfter last week’s escalating tensions, North and South Korea have agreed to cool off military provocations.
On Friday Kim Jong-un declared his country was in a ‘quasi-state of war’ with the South, but after three days of tense negotiations in an abandoned village on the peninsula’s border, the two nations have agreed on a truce.
Park Jin-Hee/Getty Images - South Korean President Park Geun-hye South Korea has agreed to stop blasting anti-Pyongyang propaganda from loudspeakers at the border, which prompted North Korea to fire artillery over the border.
North Korea expressed ‘regret’ for its actions, and promised to cause no further provocations against its neighbour. It also apologised for a landmine blast which maimed two South Korean soldiers.
AFP - Border guard postsThis comes after the North claimed it had launched an ‘invasion force’ of 10 hovercraft to the Yellow Sea, designed to land special invasion forces ashore. This was in response to the US Army sending a B-52 Stratofortress ‘bunker-buster’ warplane to the border.
The US also plans to dispatch a nuclear submarine from its base in Japan, in a display of force meant to deter North Korea from taking further military action.
Seoul has also accused the regime in the North of secretly amassing a fleet of 50 submarines behind their back. South Korean intelligence sources say they detected ‘unusual movements’ from the North’s subs, which had ‘left their bases’, and that the North had ‘doubled artillery power along the border’.
REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji - South Korean protestors at an anti-North Korea protest near the borderHopefully this will be the end of the military tension, and the two countries can go back to the extremely unstable, but less violent, situation they were in before.
