US, S. Korea Begin Large War Games Off Korean Coast

A large 4-day exercise involving U.S and South Korea forces is under way in the Sea of Japan.

It comes in response to the sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, four months ago. An international investigation blamed a North Korean torpedo attack for the incident.

The war games off the east coast of the Korean peninsula were called to send a strong message of deterrence to Pyongyang.

The joint military exercise is known as "Invincible Spirit." And while the forces of the United States and South Korea routinely conduct drills together, this war game is considered unprecedented in scope.

For the first time, the most advanced fighters of the U.S. Air Force are participating. They are the F-22 Raptors. U.S. officials say four of the stealth technology jets are taking part, along with nearly 200 other aircraft.

At sea is the strike group of the USS George Washington. The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is accompanied by three destroyers.

U.S. and South Korean top military officials say the exercises are a significant show of force intended to deter North Korea from further aggression.

South Korea originally said the U.S. aircraft carrier and other vessels would deploy in the Yellow Sea, where the Cheonan incident occurred. That announcement prompted strong protest from China.

South Korean Navy Rear Admiral Kim Kyung-shik denies pressure from Beijing was the main reason the war game was shifted from the western waters.

The admiral says planners considered the objectives for the exercise and what needed to be emphasized for training, as well as the required air and maritime space. That is why, he says, a decision was made to conduct it in the eastern waters, instead of the Yellow Sea.

The shift of location may have mollified China to some extent, but North Korea is reacting with rhetoric typically heard whenever the United States and South Korea conduct joint exercises here.

A North Korean TV newscast announcer Saturday evening quoted a statement for the National Defense Commission: the army and the people will counter the "nuclear war exercise" with atomic weaponry.

North Korea says the maneuvers could compel it "to start a retaliatory sacred war."

Analysts dismiss the statements as bluster and there is no indication of unusual activity among North Korea's forces.

The current escalating tension comes 60 years after North Korean forces crossed into the South, starting three years of combat that ended in stalemate. No peace treaty has ever been signed
==============================In Burmese==================
အေမရိကန္-ေတာင္ကုိရီးယား ေရတပ္ စစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈ စတင္

အေမရိကန္ ျပည္ေထာင္စုနဲ႔ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား ႏွစ္ႏုိင္ငံ ပူးတြဲၿပီး အဓိက ေရတပ္ စစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈတခု ဒီကေန႔ တနဂၤေႏြေန႔မွာ စတင္ လုပ္ေဆာင္ေနၿပီ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒီစစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈကို ႏ်ဴကလီးယားဆိုင္ရာ ႀကိဳတင္ ကာကြယ္ေရးေပၚ အေျချပဳၿပီး ‘ျမင့္ျမတ္တဲ့ စစ္ပြဲ’ ဆင္ႏႊဲၿပီးေတာ့ လက္တုံ႔ျပန္သြားမယ္လုိ႔ ေျမာက္ကိုရီးယားက ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္ထားပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္နဲ႔ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား တပ္ဖြဲ႕၀င္ ၈,၀၀၀ ေလာက္ ပါ၀င္တဲ့ Invincible Spirit လို႔ အမည္ေပးထားတဲ့ ဒီ စစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈကို ဂ်ပန္ပင္လယ္ျပင္မွာ ဗုဒၶဟူးေန႔ထိ လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ႏ်ဴကလီးယား စြမ္းအင္သံုး USS George Washington ေလယာဥ္တင္ သေဘၤာနဲ႔ သေဘၤာမွာပါတဲ့ ေရတပ္ဖြဲ႕၀င္နဲ႔ ေလေၾကာင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႕၀င္ ၅,၀၀၀ တို႔ အပါအ၀င္ ေရတပ္စစ္သေဘၤာ အစင္း ၂၀ တို႔ ဒီစစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈမွာ ပါ၀င္ၾကပါတယ္။

တိုက္ေလယာဥ္ ၂၀၀ ေလာက္ ပါ၀င္တဲ့ ေလ့က်င့္မႈထဲမွာ F-22 Raptor တိုက္ေလယာဥ္ေတြလည္း အပါအ၀င္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီ F-22 တိုက္ေလယာဥ္ေတြဟာ အေမရိကန္ ေလတပ္မွာ ေခတ္အမီဆံုးနဲ႔ အဆင့္အျမင့္ဆံုး တိုက္ေလယာဥ္ေတြ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

အေမရိကန္နဲ႔ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားတို႔က စစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈကို စီစဥ္ထားတဲ့အတိုင္း လုပ္ေဆာင္မယ္ဆိုရင္ သူတို႔အဆို ‘ျမင့္ျမတ္တဲ့ စစ္ပြဲ’ လို႔ ေခၚဆိုတဲ့ စစ္ပြဲနဲ႔ လက္တုံ႔ျပန္သြားမယ္လို႔ ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယား ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္ ကာကြယ္ေရး ေကာ္မရွင္က စေနေန႔မွာ ၿခိမ္းေျခာက္ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒီစစ္ေရးေလ့က်င့္မႈဟာ ေျမာက္ကုိရီးယားက ေနာက္ထပ္ ရန္စမႈေတြ လုပ္တာကို တားဆီးႏုိင္ေအာင္ အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ အင္အားျပပြဲတခု ျဖစ္တယ္လုိ႔ အေမရိကန္နဲ႔ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား စစ္ဘက္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။(VOA)