MOSCOW (Sputnik) — North Korea threatened to adequately respond to the United States if its military exercises with South Korea scheduled to be launched on Monday are not cancelled, the CNN reported Sunday.
South Korea, the United States and their allies annually conduct the joint military exercise called Ulchi Freedom Guardian (UFG), aimed at testing readiness to combat any North Korean invasion.
"The further Ulchi Freedom Guardian joint military exercises are intensified, the strongest military counteraction the (Democratic People's Republic of Korea — DPR) will take to cope with them," the CNN reported a spokesman for North Korea's National Defense Commission (NDC) as saying.
The media reported that the DPRK's threats of military actions come often, but that this time around they seem "particularly ratcheted-up."
"The army and people of the DPRK are no longer what they used to be in the past when they had to counter the U.S. nukes with rifles… North Korea… is the invincible power equipped with both [the] latest offensive and defensive means unknown to the world," the NDC spokesman was quoted as saying by the media.
The CNN noted that the Pyongyang threatened to attack the United States mainland.
The Ulchi Freedom Guardian military exercises are to last twelve days and conclude on August 28. The exercise is the world's largest computerized command and control implementation which mainly focuses on defending South Korea from a North Korean attack. The exercise was initiated in 1976 under the previous name Ulchi-Focus Lens.
