South Korea, the US and Japan are next month to hold their first joint military training focused on cooperating to detect signs of missile launches from North Korea and trace missile trajectories, a Seoul defense official said yesterday.
The drills, set for late next month, are to be held on the sidelines of biennial multinational naval exercises scheduled for waters of Hawaii from next month to August, which the three nations regularly attend, the official said, requesting anonymity, citing department rules.
TRILATERAL DRILLS
The trilateral drills are to involve Aegis-equipped ships from the three nations, but that they are not to involve missile-interception training, the official said.
The three nations have held joint search-and-rescue drills before.
The training follows the 2014 intelligence-gathering pact among the three nations designed to better cope with North Korea’s increasing nuclear and missile threats.
It was the first such agreement among the nations.
STANDOFF
An international standoff over North Korea has recently deepened after Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February.
Washington regularly holds military drills with South Korea and Japan — which together host about 80,000 US troops — and shares intelligence with them on a bilateral level.
RESENTMENT
However, Seoul and Tokyo do not, largely a result of lingering public resentments in South Korea against Japan over its 1910-to-1945 colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.
The Korean Peninsula was divided into a US-backed South Korea and a Soviet-supported, socialist North Korea at the end of the Japanese occupation.
The two Koreas fought a devastating three-year war in the early 1950, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
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