- North Korea has voluntarily ceased a temporary campaign that had it sending tons of trash—including feces—into South Korea.
- The trash was carried by a whole lot of balloons into populated areas, including Seoul.
- Although darkly humorous, an incident similar to this might easily escalate into a significant military confrontation.
South Korea has endured much from its northern neighbor, including artillery barrages, sea battles, cross-border attacks, and even tunnels dug underground. But North Korean harassment hit a brand new low last week, as a whole lot of balloons carrying garbage—some including feces—drifted south and landed within the capital city of Seoul.
“Sincere Presents”
The aerial assault began late last week, as a whole lot of balloons carrying clear plastic bags crammed with trash landed in South Korea. South Korean troops wearing surgical gloves fanned out across the country to gather the baggage. Carried by prevailing winds, the balloons landed across South Korea, reaching the southernmost provinces of the peninsula country.
A minimum of 760 bags floated southward from launching points in North Korea, with South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff military leadership estimating the speed of launch to be about 20 to 50 bags per hour. NKNews described the trash as “cigarette butts, waste paper, cloth, vinyl and other trash,” while other sites reported feces. The South Korean military stated that the balloon contents didn’t contain “chemical, biological, or radioactive materials”.
On Sunday North Korea stated it was pausing the balloon campaign but promised to start out it back up again if South Korean residents sent propaganda north.
KCNA, North Korea’s official state media agency, quoted the country’s Vice Minister of Defence, Kim King Il, as stating: “From the night of May 28 to the dawn of June 2, we scattered 15 tons of wastepaper, favorite toy of the human scum, over the border areas of the ROK and its capital region with greater than 3,500 balloons of varied sorts.”
Kang went on to state that the North would pause the poop balloon sky train … for now, anyway.
“We’re going to halt wastepaper scattering over the border temporarily as our motion was a countermeasure from A to Z. But, if (South Korean) resumes anti-DPRK leaflet scattering, we are going to correspond to it by intensively scattering wastepaper and rubbish hundred times the quantity of scattered leaflets and the variety of cases, as we now have already warned.”
Retaliation
The balloon barrage was, as bizarre because it sounds, a retaliatory strike in a propaganda war. For years, South Korean private residents (including North Korean defectors) have sent balloons northward—the one strategy to get goods across the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone that separates the 2 countries. The balloons carry anti-North Korean government propaganda, food, medicine, money, USB sticks with K-pop videos and music, news of the surface world, and non secular materials.
North Korea is one of the closed and tightly controlled societies on the planet—one which overspends on its military and is liable to economic hardship and famine. It also has a chronically mismanaged economy and a gross domestic product of just $26 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, which amounts to simply 3.5% of its neighbor, South Korea. Various groups of South Korean activists view the usage of balloons because the only strategy to communicate with people within the north.
North Korea, unsurprisingly, has a dim view of this propaganda barrage, and has complained about it for years. People found with the airborne contraband are handled harshly. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, stated that their country was doing what South Koreans have already been doing, and pledged that her country would scatter “rubbish dozens of times greater than those being scattered to us in the longer term.”
Missiles and GPS Jamming
Along with sending poop balloons, North Korea is broadcasting GPS jamming from across the border, interfering with navigation systems that use the American Global Positioning System. The jammers were originally devised to confuse American JDAM satellite-guided bombs, but are also used to harass South Korean civilians in peacetime. The jamming is currently going down off of Korea’s west coast, but is simply too weak to affect populated areas, and is currently only affecting ferries and fishing boats passing through the realm.
North Korea recently made an extra grab for attention by conducting a mass firing of short range ballistic missiles. The country concurrently launched ten short range ballistic missiles (or what it called “super-large” rockets) on May twenty ninth. The missiles, fired to the East, impacted an island 216 miles away off of the Korean peninsula’s east coast. KCNA reported that the launches—conducted by the third Battalion of the 331st Red Flag Artillery Regiment—were carried out using the country’s nuclear weapons management system, implying that the missiles might be fitted with nuclear warheads.
The launch got here exactly one week after a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report that confirmed North Korean missiles have been utilized by Russia in its war against Ukraine. Satirically, Russia was the country that originally exported missile technology to North Korea within the Nineteen Eighties, in the shape of now-obsolete Scud missiles. On May seventh, the Kyiv Independent reported that Ukrainian government officials said about half of the missiles utilized by Russia failed during flight, exploding in midair. That statement could be true, or it could be a rumor designed to emphasize the connection between Russia and North Korea. Regardless of the case, the launch of ten similar missiles three weeks ago seems less like a coincidence and more like a top quality control assurance stunt.
Although somewhat comical, events just like the mass launch of feces-filled balloons have the potential to escalate into real crisis. Overreaction on one side may lead to sharper motion by the opposite, backwards and forwards—each a step up an escalation ladder, with war waiting at the highest rung.