North Korea launched 720 balloons across the world's most heavily militarised border on Saturday night, dropping bombs loaded with plastic bags filled with cigarette butts and other trash into South Korea.
North Korea has been sending around 1,000 garbage balloons across the DMZ since last Tuesday. When the balloons reached South Korean airspace, a timer was set off, releasing plastic bags filled with various types of rubbish, including used pieces of paper and cloth.
South Korea's military denied initial reports that the balloons were carrying human waste, but noted that some of the garbage appeared to be compost.
So far, South Korean officials say “nothing dangerous has been found” in the warheads, but they warned that if North Korea continues its “senseless and irrational provocations,” South Korea will take “all measures that North Korea deems intolerable.”
North Korean officials have suggested blasting K-pop music over loudspeakers along the inter-Korean border, an idea that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sees as so threatening he once called it a “malignant cancer.”
North Korea has described the naval offensive as a “retaliatory action” and blamed defectors living in South Korea for “scattering leaflets and various filthy things” in border counties in recent days.
Here's what you need to know about this unusual attack:
It's unsettling, but not disruptive.
When South Korea reports an object being launched from North Korea, it is usually a satellite-carrying rocket or a ballistic missile of the kind that North Korea says can carry a nuclear warhead. But North Korea's actions over the past week have been a revival of a Cold War-era tactic: propaganda balloons as psychological warfare.
Last week's balloon attacks caused confusion and public frustration after the government mistakenly warned border residents of an “air raid.”
Many South Koreans have remained calm, seeing the incident as just another annoying prank by North Korea, with photos posted on social media showing the North Korean balloons floating over a city side street littered with trees, farmland and rubbish.
But South Korea's call for people not to touch the balloons and to immediately report them to authorities carried sinister overtones: North Korea is known to have large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which its operatives once used to assassinate Kim Jong-un's estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam.
Photos and video footage released by the South Korean military on Sunday showed officers in biohazard and bomb disposal gear inspecting the pile of rubbish.
Balloon races date back several decades.
During the Cold War, North and South Korea waged a psychological war. Each side tried to influence the other's population with propaganda-filled shortwave radio broadcasts. Along the DMZ, loudspeakers blasted propaganda songs at enemy soldiers day and night. Signs urged soldiers to defect to either North Korea's “People's Paradise” or the “free and democratic” South.
Both sides then launched balloons loaded with leaflets into each other's airspace. Millions of leaflets slandering the other's government were scattered across the Korean peninsula, but both countries banned their citizens from reading or possessing them. In South Korea, police rewarded children who found leaflets in the hills and reported them, often with pencils and other school supplies.
But until very recently, balloons from North Korea rarely carried general trash.
The court's ruling allowed the balloons to fly again.
By the 1990s it was clear that the North's propaganda was becoming irrelevant as the South's economy leapt ahead: the South had become a vibrant democracy and a global export powerhouse, while the North suffered chronic food shortages and relied on a personality cult and total information blackout to control its population.
When the leaders of North and South Korea met for the first time in 2000, they agreed to end government-led attempts to influence each other's peoples. But defectors and conservative and Christian activists in the South have continued their information war, sending balloons loaded with small Bibles, transistor radios, essential medicines, computer USB sticks containing K-pop music and dramas, and leaflets calling Kim Jong Un a “pig.”
To them, the bombs contained “truth” and “freedom of expression” to help wake up the North Korean people from their government's brainwashing. But to Pyongyang, they were nothing more than political “filth,” and North Korea's leaders have vowed to retaliate in kind.
Seoul subsequently enacted a law banning the leafleting of North Korea, arguing it would only provoke Pyongyang, but a few years later, in 2023, a court ruled the law unconstitutional, and activists resumed the balloon launches last month.
“We tried what they always do, and I don't understand why they make such a fuss as if they were being hit by a hail of bullets,” Kim Yo Jong, Kim's sister and spokeswoman, said last week. “If they experience how unpleasant and exhausting it is to pick up dirt, they will understand that it is never easy to dare to talk about freedom of expression.”