North Korea announced Thursday that it was “immediately” leaving a 2018 inter-Korean agreement that was intended to reduce tensions, state-run media said, after Seoul partially suspended the deal a day earlier in protest of Pyongyang’s launch of a military spy satellite.
“We will withdraw the military steps, taken to prevent military tension and conflict in all spheres including ground, sea and air, and deploy more powerful armed forces and new-type military hardware in the region along the Military Demarcation Line,” the North’s Defense Ministry said, according to a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Nuclear-armed Pyongyang said it would not be restrained by the agreement any longer, the report said, adding that the country would “immediately restore all military measures that have been halted.”
Hours after the announcement, South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik called Seoul’s partial suspension of the deal “a proportional response” and “minimal defensive measure” in the wake of the spy satellite launch, the Yonhap news agency reported, adding that South Korea, Japan and the U.S. could stage trilateral military drills over the weekend.
North Korea said Wednesday that it had successfully put its first military spy satellite into orbit, after a rocket carrying the payload passed over the Japanese archipelago late Tuesday, triggering a strong condemnation from Tokyo.
While the operational status of the satellite remains a question mark, officials from the North’s space agency told leader Kim Jong Un during a visit to the agency’s headquarters on Wednesday that it would "formally start its reconnaissance mission from December 1 after finishing 7 to 10 days' fine-tuning process."
South Korea's military said the satellite was believed to have entered orbit, but it would take time to assess whether it was operating normally.
On Thursday, South Korea’s spy agency told lawmakers that Russian technical advice had been behind the launch.
The National Intelligence Service said that Pyongyang has provided blueprints and data related to two earlier failed launches in May and August to Moscow, which offered an analysis, Yonhap reported.
Japanese and U.S. officials have said that they are continuing to analyze the launch and could not immediately determine whether it was successful or if Russia had been involved.
The Japanese government said the analysis could take “a considerable amount of time” to determine if the satellite is in orbit and operational.
Pyongyang has vowed to launch additional satellites "in a short span of time.”
The statement from North Korea’s Defense Ministry came hours after an attempt by the country to fire an unspecified ballistic missile from the Sunan area of Pyongyang toward the Sea of Japan. The South Korean military said that launch — the North’s first known weapons test in about two months — appeared to have failed.
Joseph Dempsey, an expert on North Korea’s missiles at the International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank, said a single launch from the location was unlikely to be a known short-range ballistic missile type.
It’s “plausible this was something more significant such as an ICBM launch or potentially even the first flight test of North Korea’s new solid-fuel IRBM,” he wrote on the X social media platform, referring to intercontinental and intermediate range missiles.
On Wednesday, state media said Kim viewed images of U.S. military facilities on the island of Guam taken by the satellite, during his visit to the space agency headquarters.
Kim viewed "photos of Anderson Air Force Base, Apra Harbor and other major military bases of the U.S. forces taken in the sky above Guam in the Pacific, which were received at 9:21 a.m. on Nov. 22.," a report said.
Guam, which hosts what the U.S. military calls a "continuous bomber presence" and would play a key role in any conflict on the Korean Peninsula, has been repeatedly singled out by Pyongyang as a threat to Kim’s regime.
In Thursday’s statement by the North’s Defense Ministry, Pyongyang again characterized the launch — overseen by Kim — as a "legitimate" move aimed at bolstering its "self-defense” capabilities, blaming the South for the end of the inter-Korean border agreement and warning Seoul that “any slight accidental factor may aggravate an armed conflict to an all-out war.”
In announcing a partial suspension of the pact Wednesday, Seoul said it would resume reconnaissance and surveillance activities around the border.
"North Korea is clearly demonstrating that it has no will to abide by the Sept. 19 military agreement designed to reduce military tension on the Korean Peninsula and to build trust," South Korean Prime Minister Han Duk-soo said following a Cabinet meeting.
The pact, known as the Comprehensive Military Agreement, was signed at a summit between then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s Kim. Under the deal, the two sides agreed to impose buffer zones where live-fire drills were suspended, no-fly zones were implemented and some guard posts were removed, among other measures.
But even prior to the satellite launch there had been calls for the pact to be scrapped or suspended, with critics saying it constrained Seoul's ability to monitor North Korean actions near the border.
The North’s Defense Ministry on Thursday accused Seoul of using the satellite launch as a justification to leave the agreement, claiming it had “earnestly waited” for the moment and that the deal had “long been reduced to a mere scrap of paper owing to the intentional and provocative moves” of the South.
North Korea has called the country’s spy satellite program an "indispensable" measure to counter U.S. and allied “space militarization.”
The North has been seeking to put a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit as part of a broader modernization plan to monitor U.S. and allied forces, though defense experts say doing so can be exceedingly difficult.
Observers also say it’s unclear how advanced a North Korean satellite would be, considering the daunting challenges of camera performance, hard-to-come-by components and limited time windows for snapping shots of military sites.
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