Shit is getting real over in S. Korea...
Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- Hours after North Korea's deadly artillery attacks, South Korea's president said "enormous retaliation" is needed to stop Pyongyang's incitement, but international diplomats urgently appealed for restraint.
"The provocation this time can be regarded as an invasion of South Korean territory," President Lee Myung-bak said at the headquarters of the Joint Chiefs of Staff here, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
"Given that North Korea maintains an offensive posture, I think the army, the navy and the air force should unite and retaliate against [the North's] provocation with multiple-fold firepower."
The incident "the first direct artillery attack on South Korean territory since the Korean War ended in an armistice, not a formal peace treaty" in the 1950s, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.
It has prompted great concern across South Korea and in the United States, which has 28,500 troops deployed in South Korea.
Two South Korean marines were killed and 15 South Korean soldiers and civilians were wounded when the North fired about 100 rounds of artillery at Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea, South Korea authorities. The attack also set houses and forests on fire on the island.
South Korea's military responded with more than 80 rounds of artillery and deployed fighter jets to counter the fire, defense officials said.
Firing between the two sides lasted for about an hour in the Yellow Sea, a longstanding flash point between the two Koreas. In March, a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, was sunk in the area with the loss of 46 lives in a suspected North Korean torpedo attack.
Lee called "indiscriminate attacks on civilians are a grave matter."
"Reckless attacks on South Korean civilians are not tolerable, especially when South Korea is providing North Korea with humanitarian aid," Lee said, according to Yonhap.
"As for such attacks on civilians, a response beyond the rule of engagement is necessary. Our military should show this through action rather than an administrative response" such as statements or talks, he said.
After the incident, Yonhap said the Seoul government "banned its nationals from entering the communist state, indefinitely postponed their scheduled Red Cross talks and began looking at ways to push the United Nations to condemn Pyongyang."
This latest action occurred during South Korean maritime military drills. North Korea said the incident stemmed from those exercises, codenamed Hoguk, and called the activity "war maneuvers for a war of aggression."
The "South Korean puppet group" engaged in "reckless military provocation" by firing "dozens of shells" inside its territorial waters "despite the repeated warnings of the DPRK" or Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's military said in a statement.
"The revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK standing guard over the inviolable territorial waters of the country took such decisive military step as reacting to the military provocation of the puppet group with a prompt powerful physical strike," the statement said.
"It is a traditional mode of counter-action of the army of the DPRK to counter the firing of the provocateurs with merciless strikes," said the statement, which warned that it "will unhesitatingly continue taking merciless military counter-actions against it" if the border is crossed.
A senior U.S. defense official said South Korea informed North Korea before firing its first artillery rounds, as part of that training mission, and that "there's no reason North Korea should have been surprised by this firing of artillery."
The U.S. military does not publicly announce its military posture or "state of readiness," but no changes have been observed from what U.S. forces in Korea were doing before this attack. The official says North Korea has a history of unpredictable behavior, and that "in some ways this is not surprising for them."
Some U.S. forces had been helping the South Koreans in their training exercises, but were not in the shelled area.
Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. special envoy on North Korean denuclearization, urged restraint on both sides when he spoke to reporters about the incident. He was in Beijing to discuss nuclear matters with Chinese diplomats.
"The U.S. strongly condemns this aggression on the part of North Korea and we stand firmly with our allies. The subject did, of course, come up in my meetings with the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I think we both share the view that such conflict is very undesirable. I expressed to them the desire that restraint to be exercised on all sides and I think we agree on that."
This incident comes after a U.S. scientist reported that North Korea has a new uranium enrichment facility. North Korean officials said the facility is operating and producing low-enriched uranium, according to Stanford University Professor Siegfried Hecker.
The enrichment facility contains 2,000 centrifuges and appears to be designed for nuclear power production, "not to boost North Korea's military capability," Hecker says.
But U.S. and South Korean diplomats said the latest revelation confirms the country's long-term deceit.
Sanctions have been progressively placed on North Korea in response to a succession of nuclear and missile tests and the sinking of the South Korean warship in March.
The United States said it would not dismiss restarting six-party talks aimed at denuclearizing the North. However, it said it would not return to negotiations unless North Korea showed good faith.
Countries that had been negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear program issued swift reaction. The six-party talks include both Koreas, the United States, Russia, Japan, and China.
The United States "strongly" condemned North Korea's action, and a U.S. Defense Department official told CNN that the "hope is that this is just one isolated incident, not an escalation into a different military posture" by the North.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said China had "taken note of relevant reports" and expressed its "concern." "Relevant facts need to be verified and we hope both parties make more contributions to the stability of the peninsula," he said.
Russia's Interfax news agency said Russia condemned North Korea's artillery shelling and said "those who initiated the attack on a South Korean island in the northern part of the inter-Korean maritime border line assumed enormous responsibility."
Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's cabinet held a ministerial meeting and Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku announced a government statement condemning North Korea and calling the act "unpardonable."
Asked whether the violence in the Yellow Sea would make resumption of six-party talks more difficult, Bosworth said, the "resumption of the six-party talks has never been an easy process." A formal round of talks was last held a few years ago.
"We strongly believe that a multilateral diplomatic approach is the only way to realistically to resolve these problems."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged that "any differences should be resolved by peaceful means and dialogue."
