South Korea, U.S. begin annual exercises - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

South Korea, U.S. begin annual exercises

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea and the United States have begun annual joint military exercises that North Korea routinely criticizes as a rehearsal for an invasion of the communist nation.

The weeklong exercises began Sunday. They involve 29,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean service members, as well as a computer-simulated war game with field drills.

The U.S. and South Korea characterize the annual drills as purely defensive. But North Korea condemns them as preparations for a pre-emptive attack.

North Korea warned on Sunday that what it called the “exercises for a war of aggression” could hamper progress at international disarmament negotiations over the North’s nuclear weapons ambitions.

“This may entail such serious consequences as escalating the tension between [North Korea] and the U.S. and scuttling the six-party talks for the settlement of the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula arranged with so much effort,” the North’s Minju Joson newspaper said in a report carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

An unidentified spokesman for the North’s Korean National Peace Committee also issued a statement, urging the exercises be canceled.

“If the aggressors ignite a war on this land, the army and people of [North Korea] will resolutely retaliate against them with merciless deadly blows,” said the statement carried by KCNA.

The military exercises come after six-nation talks last week in Beijing broke down without agreement on a detailed timeline for North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program.

Under a breakthrough Feb. 13 deal, Pyongyang pledged to take steps to dismantle its nuclear program in return for aid and other concessions from its negotiating partners — the U.S., South Korea, China, Japan and Russia.

About 29,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea in a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty, leaving the two Koreas technically at war.