North Korea appeared to have backed away from its threat of immediate retaliation Monday after South Korea brushed off international warnings and went ahead with live-fire artillery exercises along their disputed sea border.
Declaring that "it is not worth reacting to provocation," Pyongyang said it would not attack because Seoul had changed its firing zones.
South Korean government and military officials said the artillery guns were pointed toward Southern waters during the drills on Yeonpyeong island. The North shelled the island last month in response to similar military exercises, accusing the South of firing artillery into its waters.
After repeated fog delays over the weekend and again on Monday, South Korean marines eventually test-fired K-9 self-propelled guns and several other types of weapons during the nearly two-hour exercise on Yeonpyeong, according to a military spokesman.
South Korean fighter jets patrolled the skies over the Yellow Sea during the drills to ward off any attack from Pyongyang. Hundreds of islanders and dozens of reporters were ordered into bomb shelters. Many of the residents carried blankets, backpacks and food into the underground bunkers. Local media broadcast live reports from the island as the guns were fired.
In last month's attack, Pyongyang responded to South Korean drills with an artillery barrage that killed two South Korean soldiers and two construction workers and sent tensions soaring between the two countries, which are still technically at war after their 1950-53 war.
The North claims the waters around Yeonpyeong as its territory.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak ordered all government employees to be on heightened alert following the exercises in case of a retaliatory strike from the North. "The strongest security, the best security is a unified citizenry," Lee said. "When our citizens are one, our security is strongest."
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, said South Korea is well within its rights to conduct such exercises. "If the events of the last year have shown anything, it is that the Republic of Korea has every need and right to ready its self-defense, having lost 50 citizens simply over the course of the last nine months," Rice said, referring to the four South Koreans killed in the Nov. 23 attack on Yeonpyeong and to the 46 sailors who died in the March 26 sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, which was blamed on a North Korean torpedo.
The United Nations prepared for another round of negotiations on the stalemate in the Korean peninsula after an emergency meeting Sunday failed to produce a plan to defuse the crisis.
The five veto-holding Security Council members were split over whether to condemn North Korea's attack last month. China and Russia balked at blaming Pyongyang and asked the council to adopt a neutral statement urging both sides to exhibit restraint. But Rice said the remaining members -- the U.S., France and the U.K. -- want a clear-cut condemnation, and that the differences aren't likely to be bridged.
In a diplomatic push, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a frequent unofficial envoy to North Korea and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., held meetings with top leaders in the Foreign Ministry and military during a four-day visit to Pyongyang. He called for maximum restraint and announced what he said were two nuclear concessions.
Richardson said the North agreed to let U.N. inspectors visit its main nuclear complex to make sure the country is not producing enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. He also said Pyongyang was willing to sell South Korea 12,000 plutonium fuel rods.
"We had positive results," Richardson told Associated Press Television News at the Pyongyang airport on Monday night.
The North expelled U.N. inspectors last year and recently showed a visiting American scientist a new, highly advanced uranium enrichment facility that could give it a second way to make atomic bombs, in addition to its plutonium programs.
Doualy Xaykaothao in Seoul and Linda Fasulo in New York contributed to this report, which contains material from The Associated Press
Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. 9(MDAxNDQ2NDAxMDEyNzU2NzM2ODA3ZGI1ZA001))