South Korea, US urge Pyongyang to cease balloon campaign

Seoul, July 28 (IANS) The defence chiefs of South Korea and the United States on Sunday strongly urged Pyongyang to immediately cease its repeated launch of trash-carrying balloons into the South, Seoul's defence ministry said.

Defence Minister Shin Won-sik and his US counterpart, Lloyd Austin, made the call as they met in Tokyo for bilateral talks, where they also discussed ways to strengthen their deterrence capabilities against North Korean threats, reports Yonhap news agency.

Shin stressed that the North's continued balloon campaign is a threat to South Korea's sovereignty that breaches the Armistice Agreement, it added.

Since late May, North Korea has launched thousands of trash-carrying balloons in a tit-for-tat response against anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent by defector groups and activists in the South. South Korea has also resumed propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts near the border.

In their meeting, the defence chiefs reaffirmed their commitment to deter the North's provocations and denounced the illegal arms trade and transfer of military technology between Pyongyang and Moscow as a clear violation of the UN Security Council resolutions.

Touching on the allies' recent signing of the "Guidelines for Nuclear Deterrence and Nuclear Operations on the Korean Peninsula," Shin and Austin said the joint nuclear deterrence guidelines will provide a "solid foundation" for enhancing their extended deterrence cooperation in an integrated manner.

The defence chiefs reaffirmed that their alliance is "stronger than ever" and vowed joint efforts for peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the Indo-Pacific region, the defence ministry said.

Their meeting was held on the sidelines of a trilateral ministerial meeting of the defence chiefs of South Korea, the US and Japan, where the leaders inked a Memorandum of Cooperation on the Trilateral Security Cooperation Framework, a document meant to institutionalise their trilateral security cooperation.

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