South Korea restarts propaganda broadcasts across border in reaction to North’s balloon launches

South Korea uses loudspeakers to broadcast anti-Pyongyang messages, escalating tensions with North Korea over border provocations.

South Korea said on July 19 it has restarted blasting propaganda broadcasts into North Korea to retaliate against the North’s latest round of trash-carrying balloon launches, a resumption of Cold War-style tactics that are raising animosities between the rivals.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that it used frontline loudspeakers to blare anti-Pyongyang broadcasts over the border between Thursday evening and Friday morning.

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The broadcasts were the first of their kind in about 40 days. The contents of the broadcasts were not immediately known, but its previous ones on June 9 reportedly included K-pop songs, weather forecasts and news on Samsung, the biggest South Korean company, as well as outside criticism of the North’s missile program and its crackdown on foreign video.

The South Korean broadcasts could trigger an angry response from North Korea which is extremely sensitive to any outside attempt to undermine its political system. In 2015, when South Korea restarted loudspeaker broadcasts for the first time in 11 years, North Korea fired artillery rounds across the border, prompting the South to return fire, according to South Korean officials. No casualties were reported.

South Korea’s military earlier said North Korea floated the balloons on Thursday afternoon in its seventh such balloon campaign in recent months.

Starting in late May, North Korea has floated more than 2,000 balloons carrying wastepaper, scraps of cloth, cigarette butts and even manure toward South Korea, saying they were in response to South Korean activists sending political leaflets to the North via their own balloons. No hazardous materials were found. North Korea last flew such balloons in late June.