The bullets killed two soldiers and houses in flames, according to Reuters, one of the biggest attacks against South Korea since the Korean War in the 1950's. The two sides then exchanged more shots.
These events are closely following reports on 20 November by an engineer and two nuclear policy experts of the International Centre for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University in California who had seen a uranium enrichment plant on an industrial scale few days before a visit to North Korea.
However, the possibility that North Korea is only making fuel for nuclear power plant for peaceful purposes can not be ruled out, says the engineer Siegfried Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and his two colleagues Robert Carlin and John W. Lewis.
Although North Korea had previously announced its intention to enrich uranium, most analysts believe they have no capacity to do large scale. But Hecker said the team gave them a "stunning" view of a new enrichment plant in the complex's main Yongbyon nuclear country.
"We saw a modern plant, clean centrifuge more than 1,000 centrifuges, all perfectly aligned," Hecker wrote in a report published in the Stanford website.
North Korean officials told the team that the plant has 2,000 centrifuges already used to separate fissile uranium-235 from the heavier uranium-238.
If that is true, North Korea could make 30 to 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium per year, enough for one or two nuclear weapons, said Zhang Hui, the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Although North Korea is believed to already possess nuclear weapons based on plutonium, uranium-based weapons can be more efficient, allowing them to produce more powerful explosion, says Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC.
Uranium can also be used to trigger the nuclear fusion of heavy isotopes of hydrogen, releasing a lot more explosive power than is possible with uranium or plutonium alone, says Alvarez. But he adds that fusion weapons, North Korea first must develop other skills, including the ability to make the hydrogen isotope tritium.
North Korean officials told visitors to the plant intended to produce low enriched uranium fuel for nuclear power stations being built to generate electricity. "These facilities appear to be designed primarily for civilian nuclear energy, not to increase the military capabilities of North Korea," Hecker wrote in the report.
Hecker agrees that may soon be changed to highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. But he argues that if North Korea wants nuclear bombs would make more sense to restart plutonium production plant sleepers once used for this purpose.
Zhang said that the number of centrifuges is appropriate if they are really intended to produce fuel for nuclear power plant. He and Alvarez both say they suspect that North Korea has shown this new ability to influence future negotiations on its nuclear activities.
"I think the North Koreans are pushing hard to convince the United States over its nuclear ambitions and where it is at this moment as a way to increase their bargaining power," says Alvarez.
Regarding the situation of Yeonpyeong, refers to North Korea said South Korea's first shot, according to the BBC. South Korea says it was conducting a military exercise in the area before North Korea fired.
Jung-Hoon Lee, professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, told the BBC World Service: "If this is not an act of war, I do not know what it is ... We fired again accordance with the rules of engagement. This is the minimum, one has to wonder are we doing enough? "
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