The Koreas | Security | East Asia

This Time, the Korean Loudspeaker Standoff Is Different

Typically, South Korea has used loudspeakers to respond to North Korean provocations. Now Pyongyang has vowed to turn them on – and the prospects for de-escalation are dim.

In this image provided by North Korean state media, Kim Yo Jong visits the border area to inspect fortifications, Oct. 21, 2026.

On October 21, after inspecting fortification work along North Korea’s southern border, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, announced that “within October, the loudspeakers for psychological warfare against the ROK will be in operation along the whole border.” (ROK refers to the Republic of Korea, South Korea’s formal name.) 

Two days earlier, Kim Yo Jong had said Pyongyang was considering the step, along with deploying more “tactical strike means” near the border. As a rationale, she cited the behavior of South Korean troops near the border, claiming they had issued 2,870 warning broadcasts and fired warning shots on 201 occasions between August 1 and October 17.

South Korea has no large loudspeakers left on the border; it took them down in August 2025 as a sign of goodwill. The Ministry of National Defense said that the warnings Kim referred to were issued by smaller speakers at guard posts as a defensive measure against North Korean soldiers crossing the Military Demarcation Line (MDL). 

If the North starts broadcasting, South Korea’s military said it would consider restarting its own loudspeakers on the principle of proportional response.

The loudspeaker broadcasts began in 1963, when North Korea began using the tool and South Korea responded in kind. The first bout lasted over nine years, with broadcasts only switched off in November 1972. North Korea resumed broadcasts in 1980; the loudspeaker contest lasted even longer this time, until 2004. 

But since then, loudspeaker use has settled into a pattern: South Korea resumed loudspeaker broadcasts in response to North Korean actions in 2015, 2016, and 2024. The latest round ended in 2025, with the Lee administration’s unilateral decision to dismantle South Korean speakers. This time, North Korea is the one resuming broadcasts, citing a growing dispute over the MDL.

Since 2015, Seoul has used loudspeakers when it wants to respond to North Korean provocations without resorting to force. In August 2015, South Korea’s defense minister called the broadcasts legitimate retaliation after mines that Seoul said the North had planted in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) seriously injured two South Korean soldiers. South Korea also used loudspeaker broadcasts to respond to North Korea’s nuclear test in 2016, and again in 2024 when North Korea sent balloons filled with trash and feces across the border.

There’s a reason South Korean governments turned to loudspeakers. A broadcast is non-lethal and can be switched off at will, yet it targets something Pyongyang guards closely: its control over information. South Korean broadcasts have carried news, weather forecasts, and pop music to North Korea’s front-line soldiers, and officials said in 2015 that the sound could carry 24 kilometers at night. In June 2017, a North Korean soldier who crossed to a South Korean guard post on the central front said the broadcasts had made him decide to defect.

While South Korea considered the broadcasts to be a proportional response, North Korea sees them differently. Pyongyang called the 2015 resumption “a direct provocation of war.” The North turned its own speakers on just days after Seoul did, though South Korean officials said they were so old that their messages were nearly impossible to understand. “It just sounds like a drone,” one official said.

On August 20, 2015, South Korea’s military said North Korean forces had fired toward a loudspeaker site in Yeoncheon, north of Seoul, and South Korean artillery answered with dozens of 155 mm rounds. Pyongyang denied firing, issued an ultimatum to stop the broadcasts and declared a “quasi-state of war.” The standoff closed on August 25, 2015 with a joint statement in which the North expressed regret over the mine blasts and the South agreed to stop broadcasting “unless an abnormal situation occurs.”

That “abnormal situation” came in January 2016, when North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test. Days later, South Korea restarted its loudspeaker broadcasts. This time, the broadcasts went on for over two years. Seoul only switched them off on April 23, 2018, four days before an inter-Korean summit. The resulting Panmunjom Declaration committed both sides to stop all hostile acts along the MDL, including loudspeaker broadcasts, from May 1. 

When Seoul turned the speakers back on in June 2024, after suspending the September 2018 inter-Korean military agreement. South Korea held that North Korea had already voided the agreement through its trash balloons and over provocations. South........

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