South Korea's defense ministry reaffirmed its commitment Monday to staging military drills next month with the United States as scheduled, despite North Korea's repeated demands to halt them.
  

Seoul and Washington plan to carry out their annual major drills -- Key Resolve, a computerized command post exercise, and the field training exercise Foal Eagle -- starting in early March to check and boost their crisis management abilities and joint readiness posture.
  

"The annual drills to defend the Korean Peninsula have nothing to do with inter-Korean relations," defense ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told a regular briefing.
  

The comments came after the communist country again demanded that South Korea and the U.S. give up the plan, saying that any inter-Korean dialogue "will go nowhere under the bad circumstances of the date."
  

Pyongyang also warned that it will "bury everyone into the sea for the provocative moves."
  

Stressing that both Key Resolve and Foal Eagle have been carried out on an annual basis and are defensive in nature, Kim said the South Korean military and the government will "strongly respond to North Korea should it provoke or pose another threat over the drills." (Yonhap)