North Korea does ‘not feel any need to retaliate’

Despite days of provocative language, North Korea on Monday said it would not retaliate against South Korea’s live-fire military exercises, saying the drills were “not worth reacting” to.

With fighter jets and attack ships nearby, South Korea launched hundreds of artillery shells in a 90-minute display of power on Yeonpyeong Island, the scene of a similar exercise last month that prompted Pyongyang to respond with a shelling attack that killed four people.

This time, North Korea called the drills “reckless” but said the South Korean military had changed the direction of its artillery fire away from North Korea’s southern coast, just seven miles from the island.

Pyongyang’s “revolutionary armed forces … did not feel any need to retaliate against every despicable military provocation,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency quoted military officials as saying.

Monday’s standoff followed an emergency meeting Sunday in which the United Nations Security Council sought ways to scale back tensions on the Korean peninsula. The U.S. on Monday said that North Korea’s response to the exercises was in line with normal international behavior.

“This is the way countries are supposed to act,” a U.S. State Department spokesman said in a statement. “The South Korean exercise was defensive in nature. The North Koreans were notified in advance. There was no basis for a belligerent response.”

Obama administration officials said they would watch North Korea’s actions after a CNN report that the reclusive communist nation was prepared to allow international inspectors expelled in 2009 renewed access to unnamed nuclear enrichment facilities there. The conciliation was reportedly made during an unofficial visit to Pyongyang, the capital, by New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson.

While calling the move “a positive step,” State Department officials in Washington said they could not determine whether the offer was genuine.

“We’ve seen a string of broken promises by North Korea going back many, many years,” the agency said in its statement. “We’ll be guided by what North Korea does, not by what North Korea says it might do under certain circumstances.”

With its drills Monday, South Korea seemed prepared to engage its northern neighbor along a maritime border that has been in dispute since the war between the Koreas ended with an armistice in 1953.

Last month, South Korea’s defense minister stepped down after criticism of the military’s response to recent North Korean provocations, including Pyongyang’s alleged torpedoing of a Southern warship in March that killed 46 crewmen.

Seoul ordered residents of five front-line islands into bomb shelters and evacuated hundreds of others from its land border with the North, while marshaling to the area a flock of fighter jets and a dozen naval ships, including an Aegis-equipped destroyer.

“It is a matter of course that a divided nation in a military standoff conduct a military exercise to defend its territory as a sovereign state,” President Lee Myung-bak said Monday. “No one can dispute this.”

South Korean military officials said the 1,000 shells launched during Monday’s exercises were fired in the same direction as last month’s maneuvers — away from the North Korean coast.

North Korea appeared “afraid” of a full-blown war, said a South Korean military spokesman. He also dismissed the North’s failure to retaliate, noting that Pyongyang usually favors surprise attacks on South Korea rather than straightforward confrontations.

Analysts say that recent North Korean attacks and belligerent language may be designed to shore up the popularity of leader Kim Jong Il at home while dividing the U.S. and China, which have differed on ways to ensure peace between the Koreas.

“North Korea benefits from continued provocations to the extent that the incidents provide a pretext for even stronger domestic political control, reveal military and political weaknesses in South Korea, and divide the United States and China,” North Korea expert Scott Snyder wrote Monday in a newsletter for the Council on Foreign Relations. “An effective policy response must address these vulnerabilities by strengthening South Korean defenses and closing the U.S. gap with China on how to deal with North Korea.”

But the Security Council remained stymied on the issue. Diplomats scrapped plans for a follow-up meeting after failing to agree Sunday on a draft statement because of differences over whether to lay the blame for the ongoing tensions on Pyongyang.

“The gaps that remain are unlikely to be bridged,” Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters.

john.glionna@latimes.com