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North Korea has ablaze at least 200 artillery shells at a South Korean island Yeonpyeong in the Yellow Sea today, killing 2 troops and gravely injuring at least 12 servicemen, according to the reports.  After that, strains between North and South Korea have boiled over, with shots being fired by both sides.
Tensions have been running soaring since prior in the year when the South charged the North of torpedoing one of its navy vessels and killing the 46 sailors on board. Just 2 days ago the North exposed the subsistence of an earlier secret uranium nuclear programme.
The South Korean military went on its uppermost state of alert, the defence ministry said and YTN statement that South Korean air force jets were knotted to the island.
Today, the government assembled a meeting the president’s war trench to settle on on a plan of action following the attack. F-16 fighter jets were rounded up and the state of military willingness was lifted to its uppermost level short of war.
A ministry spokesman told that ‘A North Korean artillery unit staged an illegal firing provocation at 2:34 pm (0534 GMT) and South Korean troops fired back immediately in self-defence’.
About 1.600 people live on the island, mainly fishermen drawn by the rich nearby waters, with a garrison of 1.000 South Korean sailors.

Nuclear war.

North Korean artillery shells rained down Tuesday on a South Korean island near their disputed western sea border, killing two South Korean soldiers and setting forests and dozens of houses ablaze, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said.
At least 16 South Korean soldiers were injured, and three civilians were hurt on Yeonpyeong island, which was shrouded in smoke from the fires. Its 1.600 residents were told to evacuate to shelters, and some fled by fishing boat.
The North fired about 100 shells and the South returned fire, firing 80 shells and targeting artillery positions on the North’s coast, the Defence Ministry and Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said. The exchange of fire lasted about an hour and prompted South Korea to deploy fighter jets to Yeonpyeong.  Its military was placed on its highest peacetime alert.
North Korea blamed South Korea for starting one of the worst attacks since the 1950-1953 Korean War and threatened “merciless” strikes against its neighbour if it violates their border in the Yellow Sea.

North Korea, which fired dozens of artillery shells at the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong this morning, could make one or two bombs’ worth of enriched uranium per year if its new enrichment facility is fully operational, a nuclear analyst says.
The shells killed two soldiers and set houses ablaze, according to Reuters, in one of the heaviest attacks on South Korea since the Korean war in the 1950′s. The two countries then exchanged further fire.
These events closely follow reports on 20 November by an engineer and two nuclear policy experts from the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in California that they saw an industrial-scale uranium enrichment plant in a visit a few days earlier to North Korea.
Nonetheless – the possibility that North Korea is merely making fuel for a peaceful nuclear power plant cannot be ruled out, says engineer Siegfried Hecker (former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico) and his two colleagues Robert Carlin and John W. Lewis.