The Americans and South Koreans played high-wire war games, and the North Koreans played word games. In the perpetual battle between North and South, both were laden with intimidation and threats of real war that still seems unlikely, owing, in part, to the aerial might of the Yanks and South Koreans.

The war games put on by the Americans and South Koreans should frighten anyone wondering if they’ll go to the next level. American B52s, warhorses for decades, and F22 stealth fighters based in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa played hide-and-seek with South Korean F35’s and F15’s in one of their biggest displays this year.

No one besides their own observers saw what they were doing, but the American and Korean commands said they engaged in “joint exercises” planned  well in advance around the island of Jeju,  60 miles off the Korean peninsula’s south coast.  

The war games were in the interests of “extended deterrence,” said a South Korean military spokesman. The point was to show what they could do if North Korea were to make good on warnings and hints that it might fire  missiles, maybe laden with tactical nuclear warheads, into South Korea east into Japan.

Certainly, that was the lesson that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s outspoken younger sister, Kim Yo-jong, intended to convey in her loud rhetorical outburst in response to derisive comments about the North’s test of a spy satellite.

She seemed particularly aggrieved by observations from experts that the North’s missiles might not be too effective since they would have a problem on reentry  into the earth’s atmosphere. Nor did she appreciate experts saying that the test satellite the North shot up on Sunday was basically useless, incapable of detecting small objects.

Ms. Kim was  eager to convince the North’s enemies of the effectiveness of its missiles as well as the satellite that one of them carried for Sunday’s test. Those “who have no common sense” might realize their mistake if “if we launch an ICBM in the way of real angle firing straight off,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted her as warning.

The inference was, rather than test-fire its intercontinental ballistic missiles by shooting them high into the upper atmosphere,  her brother might order a missile shot in a straight line toward a likely target. “So-called experts,” she warned, “would be well advised to halt their nonsense and think twice..” 

There is no evidence that the North Korean satellite, which the North has said it will launch in final form in April, will provide useful information, but there was no doubt Ms. Kim was talking about finding real targets.

North Korea may have been more upset by Japan’s decision to double its defense spending and exercise the right to fire missiles in self-defense, at least if attacked and maybe if only threatened, as the North has repeatedly done.

The North’s news agency quoted an official as saying the North would demonstrate “with actual action” “how much we are concerned and displeased” by “Japan’s move to realize unjust and excessive ambition.” In a war of games, the implications, non-specific, were portentous.