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 Korea’s broadcasts in 2024 included BTS songs, regional weather, and market prices, along with a message urging North Korean soldiers laying mines to escape what it called a life of slavery.
North Korea answered not with propaganda but with sheer noise: gunshots, screams, eerie laughter, and sounds like howling wolves. Noise levels on Ganghwa Island, about two kilometers from the North, reached 80 decibels late at night. To many, North Korea’s purpose was simply to torment South Koreans.
South Korean law acknowledged the harm being done. A December 2024 amendment to the Framework Act on Civil Defense allows the state to compensate people harmed by enemy actions that fall short of a civil defense emergency. A decree issued in May 2025 included “noise broadcasting” among the “hazardous acts” it covers, alongside balloons, shooting or shelling, and drones. In July 2026, border counties began taking claims, with payments determined by the number of days residents lived with the noise.
Previously, North Korea and South Korea stopped their loudspeaker broadcasts through bilateral agreement, after discussions. But South Korea ended its last round unilaterally. New President Lee Jae-myung ordered the broadcasts stopped on June 11, 2025; the North’s broadcasts ended the next day. In August 2025, the military began dismantling its fixed loudspeakers in what the defense ministry called “a practical measure aimed at helping ease tensions with the North.” Seoul said it had not consulted Pyongyang.
Pyongyang rejected any suggestion of reciprocity. After South Korea’s military reported that the North was removing some of its own speakers, Kim Yo Jong said: “We have never removed loudspeakers installed on the border area and are not willing to remove them.” About a week later, in fact, two new North Korean speakers went up opposite the South Korean border counties of Cheorwon and Hwacheon.
Now North Korea has declared that it will resume broadcasts. If so, the new round of loudspeaker use will be different from recent history. In 2015, 2016, and 2024, Seoul began broadcasting first; this time Pyongyang has declared its intention to do so, in response to alleged South Korean provocations. This is despite repeated efforts on the part of the Lee administration in Seoul to show its goodwill toward the North.
Since Kim Jong Un declared the two Koreas hostile states in December 2023, North Korean troops have fortified the DMZ, laying mines and building roads, fences, and what appear to be anti-tank barriers. In September 2026, two mine explosions along the DMZ injured three South Korean soldiers. Seoul said the mines had been laid during the “so-called border fortification works” since 2023 – and that they were planted south of MDL that separates the two Koreas.
North Korean soldiers working near the line occasionally cross it, as evidenced by the recent mine incident. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff counted about 50 crossings in August and September 2026; South Korean troops responded with warning broadcasts and warning shots.
Kim Yo Jong, however, insisted that “our soldiers have never crossed the border.” There may be disagreement over where, exactly, the MDL is situated. If so, it will be difficult to resolve; Pyongyang ignored Seoul’s November 2025 offer of military talks to set “a clear reference line for the MDL.”
Kim’s statements framed the loudspeaker broadcasts as about the border rather than propaganda. She also issued a threat, saying that North Korean troops would show “no mercy” if South Korean warning shots ever harmed a North Korean solider. Kim also reiterated her brother’s vision that the MDL is now “a permanent line never to be crossed.”
As long as North Korean troops keep working along – and crossing – the MDL, South Korean warnings are likely to continue. That means North Korea’s responses, including the broadcasts, will as well. Seoul has also reserved the right to carry out a “proportional response” to North Korean broadcasts, although no specific action has been selected yet.
Over the longer term inter-Korean relations are likely to be shaped by interactions along the MDL, which Pyongyang now calls a permanent border and Seoul still treats as a temporary demarcation line set by the armistice. Preventing an accidental clash is now an urgent task.
With inter-Korean hotlines silent since April 2023, South Korea’s Unification Ministry has called for reconciling the two sides’ understandings of the MDL and setting up a communication system to manage it. Thus far, however, Pyongyang has refused to engage. That leaves South Korea with few options for responding to North Korean escalations without raising the risk of conflict.