In fact, the U.S. has attempted to invade Korea from long ago.

Regarding Korea as a bridgehead for its domination over Asia, the U.S. started its aggression on Korea with an intrusion of its warship General Sherman in 1866. The ship came up along the Taedong River in Pyongyang, perpetrating spying, murder and robbery, but was sunk by the heroic resistance of Koreans.

Far from drawing a lesson in the sunken General Sherman case, the U.S. intruded its warships Shenandoah and China into Korea in 1868 and launched an invasion of it on a large scale in 1871, with involvement of fleets, including flagship Colorado.

At the end of the Second World War, it occupied the southern half of Korea to divide the country into two and has since attempted to conquer the northern half by force.

At last, the U.S. unleashed the Korean War in 1950 in a bid to realize its strategy for world supremacy. The aggressive nature of this war on the part of the U.S. imperialists was well evidenced by the following irrefutable facts:

"Top secret document No. 4849" of the Information Research Bureau of the U.S. Department of State on January 28, 1949 said that in the light of Korea's geographical situation in Northeast Asia to control Korea and its people was of value to any other states interested in the Far East and it was beyond any doubt that Korea was very important for the U.S. from the political point of view.

MacArthur, then commander of the U.S. forces in the Far East, was reported to say that Korea was like a bridgehead leading to the continent and that conquering the whole of Korea would help the U.S. forces cut off the only supply line linking Siberia of the Soviet Union with its southern parts and put the whole areas between Vladivostok and Singapore under the U.S. control.

Anyhow, the three-year war ended in the defeat of the U.S. But, the U.S. imperialists did not give up their design for aggression. They committed armed provocations one after another to invade the DPRK, including intrusions of armed spy ship Pueblo and spy plane EC-121 and "Panmunjom" incident.

In the new century, too, they have schemed to unleash a war any time while persistently straining the situation on the Korean Peninsula after designating the DPRK as the first target of their preemptive nuclear attack.

To this end, military drills have been staged without letup in and around the peninsula.

The Foal Eagle joint military exercises now under way in south Korea show that the U.S. imperialists' scheme to stifle the DPRK by force has entered a more dangerous phase.

If they ignite a war in the Korean Peninsula, the revolutionary forces of the DPRK will smash the provokers without mercy.