U.S. Blamed for Persisting in State of War on Korean Peninsula

Kim Jong Un arrives at the "Arirang" mass games song-and-dance ensemble, Friday, July 26, 2013 on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the Korean War armistice in Pyongyang, North Korea., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

U.S. Blamed for Persisting in State of War on Korean Peninsula

Pyongyang, July 25 (KCNA) -- For the past six decades after the war, the U.S. imperialists have worked hard to provoke a new war against the DPRK in wanton violation of the Armistice Agreement (AA) to retrieve its shameful defeat in the Korean War.

At around 22:20 on July 27, 1953, in less than half an hour after the AA took effect, the U.S. fired several machine gun bullets into the DPRK side.

The Panmunjom incident on August 18, 1976, the case of opening fire into guards of the DPRK side on November 23, 1984 and other provocative acts have been committed one after another in the joint security area.

In less than a decade after the signing of the AA, military airplanes of the U.S. imperialist aggression troops intruded into the sky above the DPRK 693 times with the number of planes mobilized for the mission totaling 1 390.

EC-121 and other spy planes were shot down or seized but far from drawing a lesson from them, the U.S. continuously flied SR-71 high-speed, high-altitude reconnaissance plane, escalating provocation.

Spy activities by the U.S. were notably evidenced by the intrusion by armed spy ships Pueblo on January 23, 1968 and I-2 on June 5, 1970.

The fabrication of the illegal and bogus "northern limit line" was an intentional violation of the AA.

Acts of wantonly violating the AA in the sky, land and sea of Korea have reached hundreds of thousands which resulted in hundreds of sessions of the military armistice committee for the past six decades.

The weapons which the U.S. deployed in south Korea for just one year after the war were 240 M-26 tanks, 6 400 rocket launchers, more than 800 artillery pieces with various calibers, nearly 200 operational planes, 1 365 machine guns and tens of thousands of rifles. These are only figures that were revealed.

In June 1956 the U.S. forcibly expelled the inspection group of the Neutral Nations Supervision Committee from south Korea and declared in June 1957 its unilateral annulment of paragraph 13 d of AA which banned the introduction of operational planes, armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition from outside Korea.

The U.S. introduction and deployment of nuclear weapons in south Korea have steadily increased with their number exceeding more than 1 000 in the 1970s and reaching over 1 720 in the 1980s, making south Korea a region with the densest deployment of nuclear weapons in the world.

At the 14th annual security consultative meeting in March 1982, the U.S. made it official to offer a nuclear umbrella to south Korea.

Early in the 21st century, it adopted it as its policy in its "nuclear posture review" to mount a preemptive nuclear attack on the DPRK.

In 2003 the U.S. invested 11 billion U.S. dollars under its new arms buildup plan to further strengthen its aggression troops present in south Korea.

Under this plan, it deployed huge attack weapons in south Korea and beefed up cutting-edge preemptive attack weapons in recent years.

The illegal introduction of war means increased the scope of puppet south Korean army from 16 divisions at the time of the signing of the AA to 31 divisions two years after the signing. The U.S. handed over destroyers, fighters and huge other attack weapons to south Korea, bolstering the combat capacities of naval and air forces.

The U.S. is still arming the puppet south Korean army with American-made weapons.
Point 60 of paragraph 4 of the AA provides that all the foreign forces shall be withdrawn from Korea and the Korean issue be settled in a peaceful way.

But the U.S. instigated the puppet south Korean forces on August 8, 1953 to scrap it by forming the "mutual defence pact" which stipulated the permanent presence of the U.S. forces in south Korea.

At the time of a meeting of foreign ministers of relevant countries for the peaceful coordination of the Korean issue which was convened in Geneva in April 1954, the U.S. asserted that an election under the U.N supervision shall be organized all over Korea and the U.S. forces shall not pull out of Korea until a unified Korean government is set up. When this assertion was rebuffed, the U.S. scuttled the discussion of the Korean issue itself in June 1954.

After the adoption of a resolution on dismantling the "UN Command" for the lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula at the 30th UN General Assembly Session in November 1975 the U.S. has become all the more undisguised in its attempt to keep its forces in south Korea on a permanent basis through the fabrication of the U.S.-south Korea "Combined Forces Command".

Early in March 2006 it crafted a plan on enhancing the role of the countries that participated in the Korean war and allowing their participation in the detailed activities as well as in the working out of the emergency and operational plans in a bid to expand and reorganize the already defunct "UN Command" into a permanent multi-national combined armed forces organization.

The U.S. imperialist aggression forces' anti-DPRK nuclear war exercises which started with the codename of Focus Lens in 1954 have been followed by Ulji Focus Lens in 1976 and continued under codename of Ulji Freedom Guardian from 2008.

Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military exercises originated from Focus Retina staged by the U.S. and puppet south Korea at the end of the 1960s. In 1971 they continued with codename of Freedom Bolt and changed its codename to Team Spirit from 1976 till it lasted in 1993. Later the codenames changed to Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration, Foal Eagle, Key Resolve and Foal Eagle again.
The number of other DPRK-targeted war exercises and military drills staged in south Korea totaled over 18 000, when counting only those made public.

It is due to such acts of the U.S. that the original meaning of armistice has disappeared from the Korean Peninsula in the true sense of words and the evil cycle of escalation of tension and war crisis has repeated.