North Korea warned on Friday that US-South Korean plans for military manoeuvres put the peninsula on the brink of war, and appeared to launch its own artillery drills within sight of an island it showered with a deadly barrage this week.The fresh artillery blasts were especially defiant because they came as the US commander in South Korea, Gen Walter Sharp, toured the South Korean island to survey damage from Tuesday's hail of North Korean artillery fire that killed four people.
None of the latest rounds hit the South's territory, and US military officials said Sharp did not even hear the concussions, though residents on other parts of the island panicked and ran back to the air raid shelters where they huddled earlier in the week as white smoke rose from North Korean territory.
Tensions have soared between the Koreas since the North's strike Tuesday destroyed large parts of this island, killing two civilians as well as two marines in a major escalation of their sporadic skirmishes along the sea border.
The attack - eight months after a torpedo sank a South Korean warship further west, killing 46 sailors - has also laid bare weaknesses in South Korea's defence 60 years after the Korean War. The skirmish forced South Korea's beleaguered defence minister to resign Thursday, and President Lee Myung-bak on Friday named a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the post.
The heightened animosity between the Koreas is taking place as the North undergoes a delicate transition of power from leader Kim Jong Il to his young, inexperienced son Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s and is expected to eventually succeed his ailing father. The North, which sees the drills as a major military provocation, unleashed its anger over the planned exercises in a dispatch earlier Friday.
'The situation on the Korean peninsula is inching closer to the brink of war,' the report in the North's official Korean Central News Agency said. A North Korean official boasted that Pyongyang's military 'precisely aimed and hit the enemy artillery base' as punishment for South Korean military drills - a reference to Tuesday's attack - and warned of another 'shower of dreadful fire,' KCNA reported in a separate dispatch.
On Thursday, the South's president ordered reinforcements for the 4,000 troops on Yeonpyeong and four other Yellow Sea islands, as well as top-level weaponry and upgraded rules of engagement.
He also sacked Defence Minister Kim Tae-young amid intense criticism that Yeonpyeong was unprepared for the attack and that the return fire came too slowly. Lee named former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Kim Kwan-jin to the post, the president's office announced Friday. Lee, dressed in a black suit, visited a military hospital in Seongnam near Seoul Friday to pay his respects to the two marines killed in the North Korean attack. Lee laid a white chrysanthemum, a traditional symbol of grief, on an altar, burned incense and bowed before framed photos of the two young men. Consoling sobbing family members, he vowed to build a stronger defence.