North Korea launched 720 balloons filled with plastic bags containing cigarette butts and other trash toward South Korea overnight Saturday, flying over the world’s most heavily guarded border.
Since last Tuesday, North Korea have About 1,000 of these garbage balloons have flown across the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. Once the balloons reach South Korean airspace, their timers release plastic bags filled with a variety of trash, including waste paper and cloth.
South Korea’s military denied initial reports that the balloon was carrying human waste, but noted that some of the trash appeared to be compost.
So far, South Korean authorities have not found “any danger” in the missiles. But if North Korea continues its “meaningless and unreasonable provocations,” South Korea warned it would take “all measures that North Korea cannot tolerate.”
Officials said they might Turn on the speaker The playing of K-pop music on the inter-Korean border is viewed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as so threatening that he has called it “Malignant cancer”
North Korea called this naval offensive “Tit for tatNorth Korea has accused defectors living in South Korea of ”scattering leaflets and various filthy items” in its border areas in recent days.
Here is some information about this unusual offensive.
It was disturbing but not destructive.
When South Korea reports North Korean launches, they usually Rocket Carrying satellite or Ballistic Missiles North Korea says the missile is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead. But its actions over the past week have been a revival of a Cold War-era tactic: using propaganda balloons to conduct psychological warfare.
Last week’s balloon offensive sparked some confusion and public complaints after the government falsely warned people near the border of an “air strike”.
Most South Koreans remained calm, dismissing the incident as just an irritating move by North Korea. People posted photos on social media of North Korean balloons hanging from trees, over farmland or piling up trash in city alleys.
But South Korea had an ominous tone when it urged people not to touch the balloons and to report them to authorities immediately. North Korea is known to have a large number of biological and chemical weapons, which its agents have used Assassination Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s half brother.
Photos and videos released by the South Korean military on Sunday showed officers in biohazard and bomb disposal gear inspecting the garbage dump.
The balloon war dates back decades.
During the Cold War, North Korea and South Korea waged psychological warfare. They tried to influence each other’s citizens through shortwave broadcasts filled with propaganda. In the Demilitarized Zone, loudspeakers blasted propaganda songs at enemy soldiers around the clock. Billboards urged soldiers to defect to the North’s “people’s paradise” or the “free and democratic” South.
North and South Korea have also launched balloons carrying leaflets into each other’s airspace. Millions of these leaflets defaming each other’s governments evacuation The skies over the Korean peninsula were littered with the leaflets, and both Koreas forbade their people from reading or possessing them. In South Korea, when children found the leaflets in the mountains and reported them, police rewarded them with pencils and other school supplies.
But until recently, North Korea’s balloons began carrying regular trash.
The court ruled that the balloons could be released again.
By the 1990s, as South Korea’s economy took the lead, it became clear that North Korean propaganda had lost its relevance. South Korea had become a vibrant democracy and a global export powerhouse, while North Korea suffered from chronic food shortages and relied on a cult of personality and a total information blackout to control its people.
In 2000, when the leaders of North and South Korea held their first inter-Korean summit, the two countries agreed to stop government-sponsored efforts to influence each other’s citizens. North Korean defectors and conservative and Christian activists in the South Conducting information warfareBalloons containing mini Bibles, transistor radios, household medicines, computer thumb drives stocked with K-pop music and TV dramas, and leaflets calling Kim Jong-un a “pig” were sent to the public.
To them, their payloads contain “truth” and “free speech” that will help awaken the North Korean people from their government’s brainwashing. To Pyongyang, they are nothing more than political “filth,” which North Korean leaders have vowed to destroy. Retaliate in the same way.
The Seoul government then enacted a law banning the sending of leaflets into North Korea, saying they would only anger Pyongyang. But a few years later, in 2023, a court ruled the law unconstitutional, and activists resumed flying balloons last month.
“We tried what they have been doing, but I don’t understand why they are making such a fuss as if they were hit by a bullet,” Kim Jong Un’s sister and spokeswoman, Kim Yo Jong, said last week. “If they experience how uncomfortable and tiring it is to pick up trash, they will know that it is not easy to dare to talk about freedom of speech.”
