US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met with her counterparts from South Korea and Japan yesterday, emphasizing the US’ commitment to defend its allies and trilateral security cooperation to confront an accelerating nuclear threat from North Korea.
The latest top-level meetings between the countries came as North Korea apparently presses ahead with preparations for its first nuclear test explosion in nearly five years, which US officials say could occur in the next few days.
After a meeting in Seoul, Sherman, South Korean Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Cho Hyun-dong and Japanese Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Takeo Mori issued a joint statement condemning North Korea’s “provocative” streak in weapons demonstrations this year and pledging closer security cooperation to curb the growing threats.
Photo: AFP
The statement said Sherman reaffirmed “steadfast” US commitments to the defense of South Korea and Japan, including “extended deterrence,” referring to an assurance to defend its allies with its full military capabilities.
“The United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan are fully and closely aligned on the DPRK,” Sherman said in a news conference, using the initials of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Sherman said that North Korea since September last year has significantly increased the pace and scale of its ballistic launches, posing a “serious threat” to security in the region and beyond, and urged Pyongyang to cease taking “these provocative and destabilizing actions, and to commit to the path of diplomacy.”
Jolting an old pattern of brinkmanship, North Korea has already set an annual record in ballistic launches through the first six months of this year, firing 31 missiles over 18 test events, including its first demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) since 2017.
The unusually fast pace in testing activity underscores North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s dual intent to advance his arsenal and pressure the administration of US President Joe Biden over long-stalled negotiations aimed at leveraging its nuclear arsenal for economic and security concessions, experts have said.
Sherman’s visit to Asia came after North Korea in its biggest-ever single-day testing event launched eight ballistic missiles into the sea from multiple locations on Sunday, prompting the US and its Asian allies to respond with missile launches and aerial demonstrations involving dozens of fighter jets.
A nuclear test would further escalate North Korea’s pressure campaign and could possibly allow the country to claim it acquired the technologies to build a bomb small enough to be clustered on a multi-warhead ICBM or on Kim’s broad range of shorter-range weapons threatening South Korea and Japan.
South Korean and US officials have said that the North has all but finished preparations for a detonation at its nuclear testing ground in the remote northeastern town of Punggye-ri, an assessment backed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which says there are indications that one of the site’s passages has been reopened.
The site had been inactive since hosting the country’s sixth nuclear test in September 2017, when it claimed it detonated a thermonuclear bomb designed for its ICBMs.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS