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The North Korean military had a busy weekend firing dozens of short-range rockets into
waters off its east coast on Saturday and Sunday.
Sunday's firings were the seventh of their kind in the space of a month.
Our Laah Hyun-kyung has the details. Thirty short-range rockets Saturday and another 16
on Sunday morning. North Korea continues to fire projectiles
into the East Sea. South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff says...
those launched on Sunday are believed to have been Soviet-era short-range FROG missiles.
The firing took place from North Korea's eastern port city of Wonsan... between 12:50 and 2:20
early Sunday morning. The rockets flew about 60 kilometers -- the
same distance as those launched on Saturday. Dating back to last weekend, the North has
fired more than 70 short-range rockets into its eastern waters.
Sunday's firing is the seventh time Pyongyang has launched short-range missiles in the past
month -- an unusually high number, experts say.
North Korea claims the launches are part of routine exercises,... but military analysts
in Seoul believe they are Pyongyang's way of acting out against the on-going annual
joint military drills between Seoul and Washington, which the North denounces as being practice
for an invasion. An editorial in North Korea's daily Rodong
Shinmun on Sunday says... the reason the Korean peninsula has not broken out in war is because
of Pyongyang's patience. It added that the only reason the regime has
nuclear weapons... is to put an end to Washington's persistent threats.
Meanwhile, a recent U.S. military report says... North Korea spent somewhere between 6 and
10 billion dollars on military expenses in 2010.
That is roughly 17 to 23 percent of the nation's total GDP... placing it atop the list, followed
by Saudi Arabia. Laah Hyun-kyung, Arirang News.