SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean marines have dismantled a 43-year-old Christmas tower on the border with North Korea that the North had threatened to attack with artillery, officials here said on Wednesday.

Built on a front-line hilltop northwest of Seoul in 1971, the 59-foot steel tower, tipped with a cross, used to be illuminated with cascades of light bulbs around Christmas during the Cold War years. Batteries of loudspeakers sent Christmas carols drifting across the snow-covered border into the North, where the totalitarian regime repressed religious freedom.

It was part of the psychological warfare the two Koreas continued to wage along the 155-mile border even after their three-year war ended with a truce in 1953. The sides carved their border hills with large slogans exhorting opposing troops to defect to the capitalist South “for freedom” or to the “people’s paradise” of the communist North. They also used radio broadcasts and balloons carrying propaganda leaflets.

The rival Koreas discontinued most of the campaign after they agreed to stop slandering each other when they held a summit meeting in 2000.