North Korea slams Seoul's armed forces day parade

North Korea on Wednesday lambasted the large scale military parade staged by South Korea to mark the 65th anniversary of its armed forces as a confrontational act that can bring about war. South Korea's military mobilized some 11,000 troops, 190 pieces of various equipment and 120 aircraft for the ceremony held at an airbase south of the capital city on Tuesday. The event, which was the largest organized in a decade, also included a parade by troops and military hardware through the center of Seoul. In an article carried by the Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, Pyongyang said by organizing the ceremony, the South aimed to strengthen ties with the United States and generate public fervor for another invasion of the North. The North has always insisted that South Korea and the United States started the 1950-53 Korean War by invading the communist country and has never acknowledged that it started the bloody conflict that devastated the entire peninsula. The paper, which reflects the views of the country's ruling class, added that the display of the 500-kilometer-range Hyunmoo 2 ballistic missile and the 1,000-km-range Hyunmoo 3 cruise missile and other advanced weapons can only be viewed as an ill-advised measure to spike up tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Such a development, the daily warned, can lead to war. It then said that South Korean authorities must realize that they cannot gain anything in inter-Korean relations by hanging onto the coattails of foreign powers.