Weeks into North Korea’s campaign of launching balloons loaded with trash across the world’s most heavily armed border, some of them hit a symbolically significant target in South Korea on Wednesday: the presidential office in the heart of Seoul, the capital.
North Korea has released more than 3,000 of the trash balloons since May, many of which have reached the South after floating across the Demilitarized Zone between the two nations. So far, they have been a nuisance but have posed no danger. They have landed on trees, farms, and urban side streets, their payloads bursting and spilling out waste paper, used cloth, cigarette butts, and compost.
On Wednesday, for the first time, some of them landed inside the sprawling compound in central Seoul that includes the office of President Yoon Suk Yeol. The authorities did not say exactly how many had reached the compound, one of the most tightly guarded places in South Korea.
Officials said they waited for the balloons to land before sending a chemical, biological and radiological response team to inspect their payloads, rather than blast them and scatter their suspicious payloads from the sky. The team found “nothing dangerous or contaminating,” South Korea’s presidential security service said in a brief statement.
It declined to say what the balloons carried or exactly where they landed inside the 68-acre compound, which also houses the Ministry of National Defense and other military facilities and is about 25 miles from the border.
The balloon campaign is reminiscent of tactics the two Koreas used during the Cold War to scatter propaganda leaflets condemning each other’s governments. That psychological warfare receded after the first summit meeting between the Koreas’ leaders in 2000.
