Image released by the South Korean Defense Ministry, South Korean Air Force F-35 fighter jets and U.S. Air Force F-16 fighter jets fly over South Korea during the joint air drills in response to North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile, ICBM, launch on Friday, Nov, 18. Yonhap

South Korea plans to revive a reference to the North Korean regime and its military as an "enemy" in its defense white paper to be published next month under the conservative administration of President Yoon Suk-yeol, government sources said Tuesday.

The move comes in the wake of Pyongyang's relentless weapons tests, including the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile launch last month and the firing this week of artillery shells into maritime "buffer zones" set under a 2018 inter-Korean accord to reduce tensions.

"An expression referring to the North Korean regime and its military as an enemy has been included in the draft of the white paper," a source said on condition of anonymity.

Before his inauguration on May 10, Yoon's transition team announced 110 key policy tasks, including considering reinstating the "enemy" label for the North Korean military in the biennial defense white paper and other documents.

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In line with the task, Seoul's defense ministry has distributed troop education materials that describe the North's military as an enemy.

The North Korean military was first referred to as an "enemy" in the defense policy paper in 1995 after a Pyongyang official threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of flames." In the 2004 version, the expression was replaced by a "direct military threat" amid a conciliatory mood.

The enemy description was revived in 2010 as the North torpedoed a South Korean corvette in March of that year, killing 46 sailors, and launched an artillery attack on a border island in November, killing two soldiers and two civilians. The expression stayed until the 2016 edition of the paper.

But the enemy label disappeared in the white papers that the then liberal Moon Jae-in administration published in 2018 and 2020 amid its drive for cross-border reconciliation. (Yonhap)