‘Crisis Status’ in South Korea After North Shells Island

The South Korean military went to “crisis status” on Tuesday and threatened military strikes after the North fired dozens of shells at a South Korean island, killing two of the South’s soldiers and setting off an exchange of fire in one of the most serious clashes between the two sides in decades.

President Lee Myung-bak met with security-related ministers and senior aides in the underground situation room at the Blue House, the presidential office and residence, and promised “a strenuous retaliation” if there was any further provocation, said the chiefpresidential spokesman, Hong Sang-pyo.

The North blamed the South for starting the exchange; the South acknowledged firing test shots in the area but denied that any had fallen in the North’s territory. It was in the same area that a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, was sunk in March, killing 46 sailors. Seoul blamed a North Korean torpedo attack; the North has denied any role.

The United States, Britain and Japan on Tuesday condemned the latest attack. The White House called on North Korea to “halt its belligerent action.” American officials tracking the episode said that a total of 175 artillery shells had been exchanged by the two sides.

The South Korean Defense Ministry said that in addition to the two soldiers who were killed, 15 soldiers and 3 civilians were wounded. There was no immediate sense of the North’s casualties.

Television footage showed large plumes of black smoke spiraling from the island, and news reports said dozens of houses were on fire. The South put its fighter planes on alert but they did not take off.

Over 200 residents of Yeonpyeong island fled by ferry to the mainland town of Incheon in the South, South Korean news media reported. In Twitter postings from in and around Seoul, the city’s mood appeared pitched between anxiousness in the wake of the first attack on a civilian area since the Korean War and a tense, resilient calm. “Seoul is responding well, staying our cool!” Ryan Ilchul Shin wrote on Tuesday.

Skirmishes between the two countries have not been uncommon in recent years, but their tense relations have worsened in the last week after an American nuclear scientist who recently visited the North said he had been shown a secret and modern nuclear enrichment facility.

Analysts were quick to see the shelling as a deliberate North Korean provocation, some linking it to the need for food aid, which has been largely denied by South Korea and strangled by international and United States sanctions. Adding to the North’s internal calculus, the ailing leader, Kim Jong-il, has been positioning his youngest son as his successor.

The attack on Yeonpyeong came as 70,000 South Korean troops were beginning an annual nationwide military drill called Safeguarding the Nation. The exercise has been sharply criticized by Pyongyang as “simulating an invasion of the North” and “a means to provoke a war.” American officials said the South’s military exercise had been announced well in advance, and should not have come as a surprise to the North.

The official North Korean news agency said in a brief statement on Tuesday night that the South “recklessly fired into our sea area.”

The South Korean deputy minister of defense, Lee Yong-geul, said artillery units had been firing from a battery on the South Korean island of Baeknyeongdo, close to the North Korean coast.

Yeonpyeong Island sits just two miles from the Northern Limit Line, the disputed sea border which the North does not recognize, and only eight miles from the North Korean coast. The island houses a garrison of about 1,000 South Korean marines, and the navy has deployed its newest class of “patrol killer” guided-missile ships in the Western Sea, as the Yellow Sea is also known.

About 1,600 civilians also live on the island, mostly fishermen, and local news reports said that by late afternoon some residents had fled the island on fishing boats.

Chinese officials said they were “concerned” and called on both sides to resume six-party talks that have focused on persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. “We hope the relevant parties will do more to contribute to the peace and stability of the Korean peninsula,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a regular briefing in Beijing.

Officials gave the impression, however, that China was in the dark about the attacks. “The situation needs to be verified,” Mr. Hong said, adding that “China is willing to stay in close communication with the relevant parties concerning the Korean nuclear issue.”

The Japanese government called North Korea’s actions “unforgivable,” Reuters reported.

The Russian Foreign Ministry urged restraint and a nonmilitary resolution, while the British Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned the “unprovoked attack” and urged Pyongyang to refrain from hostilities.

A spokeswoman for the Unification Ministry in Seoul said Tuesday night that the South Korean Red Cross had indefinitely postponed a Thursday meeting with North Korean officials on further reunions between family members separated since the Korean War. She also said the ministry was “reviewing the security situation” for several hundred South Korean workers at the Kaesong Industrial Park, a jointly operated facility in North Korea.

Naval skirmishes occurred in the western sea in 1999 and 2002. And in August, North Korea fired 110 artillery rounds near Yeonpyeong and another South Korean island, the Office of Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said at the time.

Three weeks ago, the South Korean Navy fired warning shots at a North Korean fishing boat after the vessel strayed across the Northern Limit Line. The North Korean boat then reportedly retreated.

The new clash came just days after an American nuclear scientist who visited North Korea earlier this month said he had been shown a vast new facility built secretly and rapidly to enrich uranium.

The scientist, Siegfried S. Hecker, a Stanford professor who previously directed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in an interview that he had been “stunned” by the sophistication of the new plant, where he saw “hundreds and hundreds” of centrifuges that had just been installed in a recently gutted building and operated from what he called “an ultra-modern control room.” The North Koreans claimed 2,000 centrifuges were already installed and running, he said.

The development confronted the Obama administration with the prospect that North Korea country is preparing to expand its nuclear arsenal or build a far more powerful type of atomic bomb.

Whether the calculated revelation is a negotiating ploy by North Korea or a signal that it plans to accelerate its weapons program even as it goes through a perilous leadership change, it creates a new challenge for President Obama at a moment when his program for gradual, global nuclear disarmament appears imperiled at home and abroad.

One of the analysts who linked the North’s action to food aid was Choi Jin-wook, a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a research institute in Seoul. “It’s a sign of North Korea’s increasing frustration,” Mr. Choi said.

“Washington has turned a deaf ear to Pyongyang and North Korea is saying, ‘Look here. We’re still alive. We can cause trouble. You can’t ignore us.’ ”

Mr. Choi said North Korea had become frustrated over the Obama administration’s refusal to remove a broad range of sanctions against the regime for its continuing nuclear efforts.

“They see that they can’t pressure Washington,” he said, “so they’ve taken South Korea hostage again.”

“They’re in a desperate situation, and they want food immediately, not next year,” he said.

John Swenson-Wright, an expert with the Royal Institute for International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, a private policy organization in London, called the episode “a serious escalation.”

“I can’t think of recent event in the past 5 or 10 years that approaches this magnitude,” he said in a telephone interview.

Mr. Kim’s s youngest son, Kim Jong-un, was promoted on Sept. 28 to the rank of four-star general, a prerequisite for his ascendancy to power. The elder Mr. Kim, who is said to be in poor health after apparently suffering a stroke in 2008, has hurried the succession of his son in recent weeks.

Other members of the Kim family and the leader’s inner circle also received new posts and promotions as the leadership hierarchy was reshuffled to provide Kim Jong-un with mentors and supporters as he solidifies his power.

Reporting was contributed by Su-hyun Lee from Seoul, Kevin Drew from Hong Kong, Alan Cowell from Paris, Thom Shanker from Washington, Ian Johnson from Beijing, Clifford J. Levy from Moscow and J. David Goodman from New York.