Manure. Dead batteries. Cigarettes. Scraps of cloth. Even, some say, diapers. North Korea floated hundreds of huge balloons carrying trash across to rival South Korea this week. It’s an old-fashioned annoyance—but it’s got people around the world talking.
Flying balloons with propaganda leaflets and other items is a common type of mental warfare. The two Koreas launched many such campaigns against each other during the Cold War of the 1950s to the 1990s. Other propaganda forms included blaring loudspeakers, giant electronic billboards, and radio broadcasts. In recent years, the two Koreas agreed to halt such activities but sometimes resumed them when tensions rose.
Since Tuesday night, South Korea has discovered about 260 balloons flown over the border from North Korea. So far, the South Korean military believes the trash tied to the balloons doesn’t contain any dangerous substances like chemical or radioactive materials.
Somewhat recent balloon incidents include one in 2016 in which North Korean balloons carrying trash, compact discs, and propaganda leaflets damaged cars and other property in the South. In 2017, South Korea found a suspected North Korean balloon with propaganda leaflets. This week’s balloons carried no leaflets.
The North’s balloon launches are part of a series of provocative steps. They include a failed spy satellite launch and test-firings of about 10 suspected short-range missiles earlier this week.
“The balloon launches aren’t weak action at all. It’s like North Korea sending a message that next time, it can send balloons carrying powder forms of biological and chemical weapons,” says Kim Taewoo. Kim is former president of South Korea’s government-funded Institute for National Unification.
On Wednesday, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un confirmed that North Korea sent the balloons and attached trash sacks. She says the packages make good on her country’s recent threat to “scatter mounds of wastepaper and filth” in South Korea in response to leafleting campaigns by South Korean activists.
Experts say the balloon campaign is more than just unkindness. They believe the rubbish-laden inflatables are meant to divide South Koreans over the government’s North Korea policy.
Koh Yu-hwan was a professor at Seoul’s Dongguk University. “The point is to make the South Korean people uncomfortable and build a public voice that the government’s policy toward North Korea is wrong,” he says.
North Korea is extremely sensitive to leaflets that South Korean activists occasionally float across the border via their own balloons. Those leaflets carry information about the outside world. They criticize Kim’s dictator-like rule. Most of the North’s 26 million people have little access to foreign news.
North Korea is one of the world’s most secret countries. Foreign experts are keen to collect any information coming from the country.
But Koh says there won’t be much helpful information from the North Korean trash because North Korea wouldn’t put anything important in balloons.
Still, experts will closely examine the trash. If the manure is made of animal dung, it may show what fodder is given to livestock in North Korea. Looking at other trash could provide a glimpse into North Korea’s consumer products. However, observers say experts can get such data more easily from North Korean defectors, contacts in North Korea, and North Korean state publications.
