On Wednesday, Pyongyang sent balloons full of trash, toilet paper and suspected animal faeces into the South, with Seoul’s military slamming Pyongyang for their “low class” actions.
The North had warned over the weekend that it would shower border areas in “mounds of wastepaper and filth” to punish Seoul.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister Kim Yo Jong mocked the “goblins of liberal democracy” in Seoul for complaining about the balloons, and pledged more could follow.
The salvo of ballistic missiles also comes just days after North Korea’s latest attempt to put a spy satellite into orbit ended in a mid-air explosion on Monday.
North Korea said late Monday that the rocket carrying its Malligyong-1-1″ reconnaissance satellite exploded minutes after launch due to a suspected engine problem.
Japanese broadcaster NHK ran footage of what appeared to be a flaming projectile in the night sky, which then exploded into a fireball, saying it had filmed it from northeast China at the same time as the attempted launch.
Putting a reconnaissance satellite into orbit has long been a top priority for Kim’s regime, and it claimed to have succeeded in November, after two failed attempts last year.
In a speech released by the official Korean Central News Agency late Wednesday, Kim said the country was undeterred by the recent failed satellite launch.
“Although we failed to achieve the results we had hoped to get in the recent reconnaissance satellite launch, we must never feel scared or dispirited but make still greater efforts,” he said.
“It is natural that one learns more and makes greater progress after experiencing failure,” he said, according to the transcript of the speech, given at the Academy of Defence Sciences.
