North Korea launched 720 balloons across the world’s most heavily armed border overnight Saturday, hitting South Korea with their payloads: plastic bags filled with cigarette butts and other trash.
Since last Tuesday, North Korea has sent approximately 1,000 of these garbage balloons across the Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Koreas. Once the balloons reached South Korean airspace, their timers released the plastic bags containing assorted trash, including used scraps of paper and fabric.
South Korea’s military dismissed initial reports that the balloons were carrying human waste, but did note that some of the trash appeared to be compost.
So far, Southern authorities have found “nothing dangerous” in the payloads. But if North Korea persisted in its “irrational and senseless provocation,” the South warned that it would take “all measures that North Korea may consider unbearable.”
Its officials indicated they could turn on their speakers along the inter-Korean border to play K-pop music, which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un found so threatening that he once called it a “cruel cancer.”
The North has called the floating offensive a “tit-for-tat action.” He has accused North Korean defectors living in South Korea of “spreading leaflets and various dirty things” in their border counties in recent days.
Here’s what you should know about the unusual offensive.
It has been disturbing but not disturbing.
When South Korea reports objects launched from North Korea, they are usually rockets carrying satellites or ballistic missiles of a type the North says is capable of carrying nuclear warheads. But North Korea’s actions last week have been a resurgence of a Cold War-era tactic: propaganda balloons as psychological warfare.
Last week’s balloon offensive sparked some confusion and public complaints when the government wrongly warned people near the border of an “airstrike.”
Most South Koreans remained calm and treated the episode as little more than irritating North Korean antics. On social media, people posted photos of North Korean balloons in trees, on farmland or on trash-strewn urban side streets.
But there was an ominous undertone when South Korea urged people not to touch the balloons and to report them to the authorities immediately. North Korea is known to possess large stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, which its agents once used to assassinate Kim’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam.
Photos and videos released by South Korea’s military on Sunday showed officers dressed in bomb disposal and biohazard gear inspecting piles of trash.
The balloon rivalry goes back decades.
During the Cold War, North Korea and South Korea waged psychological warfare. They attempted to mutually influence citizens with propaganda-laden shortwave radio broadcasts. Throughout the DMZ, loudspeakers bombarded rival soldiers day and night with propaganda songs. The posters urged soldiers to defect to a “people’s paradise” in the North or to the “free and democratic” South.
And the two Koreas launched balloons loaded with leaflets into each other’s airspace. Millions of such pamphlets defaming the other side’s government were scattered across the Korean Peninsula, material that both Koreas prohibited their people from reading or keeping. In the south, police rewarded children with pencils and other school supplies when they found the pamphlets in the hills and reported them.
But until recently, North Korea’s balloons rarely carried ordinary trash.
A court decision allowed the balloons to fly again.
By the 1990s, it was clear that Northern propaganda was losing relevance as the Southern economy advanced. The South had become a vibrant democracy and a global export power, while the North suffered from chronic food shortages and depended on a cult of personality and a total information blackout to control its people.
When their leaders held the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, the two Koreas agreed to end government-sponsored efforts to influence each other’s citizens. But North Korean defectors and conservative and Christian activists in the South continued the information war, sending balloons loaded with mini Bibles, transistor radios, household medicines, computer USB drives containing K-pop music and drama, and leaflets calling for the Mr. Kim. a pig.”
To them, their payloads contained “truth” and “freedom of expression” that would help wake up North Koreans from their government’s brainwashing. To Pyongyang, they were nothing more than political “filth,” and North Korean leaders vowed to retaliate in kind.
The Seoul government then enacted a law banning leaflets from being sent to the North, saying they did nothing but provoke Pyongyang. But a few years later, in 2023, a court declared the law unconstitutional and last month activists launched balloons again.
“We have tried something they have always been doing, but I can’t understand why they are making a fuss as if they were hit by a hail of bullets,” Kim Yo-jong, Kim’s sister and spokeswoman, said last week. “If you experience how unpleasant the feeling of picking up trash is and how tiring it is, you will know that it is not easy to dare to talk about freedom of expression.”