Though it probably isn’t nearly as big of a deal as it is being made out, North Korea’s state newspaper has reiterated that the government has “completely scrapped” the 1953 armistice that brought an end to fighting in the Korean War, which itself is still technically going on 60 years later.
The North Korean military has been talking up ending the armistice for a solid week now, citing upcoming US-South Korean wargames and the imposition of new sanctions on them. The wargames are an annual occurrence, as is the North Korean outrage over them.
Ending the armistice is a little less common, but not hugely so. North Korea has “scrapped” the deal regularly, most recently in 2009 during that year’s wargames, but nothing ever seems to come of such announcements, which are mostly brushed off as bluster.
The North Korean military often makes threats that the rest of the government appears completely uninterested in following through on, and also threatened to nuke the United States last week, something they are incapable of at any rate since they have neither the missiles to hit the US coast nor have they miniturized their nuclear weapons to a size capable of being put on a warhead.