Prepare for the North’s aberrant attacks

North Korea repeatedly jammed GPS signals targeting a number of northwestern islands in the West Sea Thursday morning. As a result, many passenger ships and fishing boats to and from Incheon Harbor experienced failures with their navigation systems. The methodical disturbance started shortly after the North launched more than 10 short-range ballistic missiles from a location near Pyongyang that day.

North Korea did the same the previous day. Fortunately, no damage was incurred, but if vessels had lost their GPS signals and crossed the Northern Limit Line — a tense maritime border on the West Sea — it could have outright spiked a military clash. The North even sent at least 260 balloons carrying propaganda leaflets, trash and excrement across the heavily fortified border to the South. Local authorities had to issue emergency alerts to residents in Seoul and Gyeonggi to prepare for a possible air raid from North Korea.

We cannot brush off the North’s move simply as an attempt to vent its frustration from the failed launch of military reconnaissance satellites on Monday. The latest provocation can be linked to its bigger design to carry out a limited attack on the South or induce a military clash in the West Sea. The North forewarned the South about the possibility of an armed conflict at sea and sending leaflets. As the North Korean military reported that plan to their leader Kim Jong-un, additional provocations will most likely follow, as strongly suggested by his sister Kim Yo-jong’s brazen threat to continue sending balloons to the South.

Pyongyang must stop such dirty tricks. North Korea says it dispatched the balloons in retaliation for South Korean civic groups’ sending propaganda leaflets to the North. But it went too far. Kim Jong-un last year defined inter-Korean relations as “between two hostile states.” If the South-North relations are really between two different states, he should be well aware of the concept of reciprocity in international relations, given his record of studying in Switzerland when he was young. The act of flying balloons filled with manure and waste to the South will only invite ridicule from the international community, further isolating the closed country.

Our government should be prepared for such nonmilitary and asymmetrical provocations down the road while minimizing security risks. If those balloons carry lethal germs or viruses, the damage will be enormous.

After the Covid-19 pandemic broke out in the North in 2022, it blamed the South for “sending balloons filled with noxious germs.” Our government must prove its ability to publicize such a despicable act to the rest of the world to make the recalcitrant state across the border regret what it did.