S. Korea, U.S. to Ignore North, Hold Maneuvers

U.S. and South Korean troops will conduct their annual major military exercise this March on the tense Korean Peninsula despite warnings from the north, a spokesman for the Combined Forces Command announced Thursday.

At least 200,000 troops will take part in the annual Team Spirit maneuvers, including about 60,000 Americans. The more than 40,000 U.S. servicemen stationed here will be joined by other units based in the United States and elsewhere in the Pacific.

North Korean officials have warned that any provocative act could touch off a conflict on the divided peninsula, and the North Korean news agency said the exercise would escalate tension.

Rhetorical exchanges between the Seoul government and the Communist regime in Pyongyang have reached a blistering level in recent weeks, after a 26-year-old woman told a press conference here that she was a North Korean agent and helped sabotage a South Korean airliner last November, killing 115 passengers and crew.

South Korea has mounted a successful campaign of international censure against the North Korean government and put Seoul’s 600,000-man armed forces on alert. Pyongyang spokesmen have responded by denying complicity and accusing the Seoul government of staging the sabotage to help the ruling party win December’s presidential election.

The Combined Forces spokesman said North Korea has been notified of the plans for the Team Spirit exercise, which has been conducted annually since 1976, and had been invited to send observers.

Even before the sabotage of the airliner, relations between the two Koreas had been strained by arguments over Pyongyang’s demand that it act as co-host for the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul.

With the tension engendered by the Olympics and the elections, there had been unofficial reports that the air, sea and ground maneuvers, which will take place over two weeks in late March, might be suspended. North Korea, as it has every year since the exercises began, condemned them as a warlike provocation. But no South Korean or U.S. official has indicated that they might be called off.