The South Korean, US and Japanese navies yesterday began their first anti-submarine drills in six months to boost their coordination against increasing North Korean missile threats, South Korea’s military said.
The two-day drills come as North Korea’s recent unveiling of a type of battlefield nuclear warhead prompted worries the country might conduct its first nuclear test since 2017.
The maritime exercises in international waters off South Korea’s southern island of Jeju involved the nuclear-powered USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and naval destroyers from South Korea, the US and Japan, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense said in a statement.
Photo: EPA-EFE
The training was arranged to improve the three countries’ capacities to respond to underwater security threats posed by North Korea’s advancing submarine-launched ballistic missiles and other assets, the statement said.
South Korean defense officials said the three countries were to detect and track uncrewed South Korean and US underwater vehicles posing as enemy submarines and other assets.
Submarine-launched missiles by North Korea are serious security threats to the US and its allies, because it is harder to spot such launches in advance. In recent years, the North has been testing sophisticated underwater-launched ballistic missiles and pushing to build bigger submarines including a nuclear-powered one.
Last month, North Korea performed a barrage of missile tests in response to the earlier South Korea-US bilateral military drills. The weapons tested included a nuclear-capable underwater drone and a submarine-launched cruise missile, which suggest North Korea is trying to diversify underwater weapons systems.
Photographs in North Korea’s state media last week showed North Korean leader Kim Jong-un standing near about 10 red-tipped warheads called “Hwasan (Volcano)-31” with different serial numbers. A poster on a nearby wall listed eight kinds of short-range weapons that can carry the “Hwasan-31” warhead. The previous test flights of those weapons show they are capable of striking key targets in South Korea, including US military bases there.
Some observers have said the warhead’s unveiling might be a prelude to a nuclear test as North Korea’s last two tests in 2016 and 2017 followed the disclosures of other warheads.
If it does conduct a nuclear test, it would be its seventh detonation overall and the first since September 2017.
During the warhead-related event last week, Kim also ordered officials to ramp up bomb-fuel production to achieve his stated goal of expanding his country’s nuclear arsenal “exponentially.”
Foreign experts debate whether North Korea has functioning nuclear-armed missiles.
However, South Korean Minister of National Defense Lee Jong-Sup recently told lawmakers that the North’s technology to build miniaturized warheads to be mounted on advanced short-range missiles was believed to have made considerable progress.
In remarks carried in the defense ministry statement, Rear Admiral Kim Inho, chief of the South Korean forces involved in the trilateral drills, said: “We’ll decisively respond to and neutralize any type of provocation by North Korea.”
In addition to the anti-submarine drills, the three countries are to practice humanitarian search-and-rescue operations.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
OUTRAGE: The former strongman was accused of corruption and responsibility for the killings of hundreds of thousands of political opponents during his time in office Indonesia yesterday awarded the title of national hero to late president Suharto, provoking outrage from rights groups who said the move was an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses and corruption that took place during his 32 years in power. Suharto was a US ally during the Cold War who presided over decades of authoritarian rule, during which up to 1 million political opponents were killed, until he was toppled by protests in 1998. He was one of 10 people recognized by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto in a televised ceremony held at the presidential palace in Jakarta to mark National
US President Donald Trump handed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a one-year exemption from sanctions for buying Russian oil and gas after the close right-wing allies held a chummy White House meeting on Friday. Trump slapped sanctions on Moscow’s two largest oil companies last month after losing patience with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his refusal to end the nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. However, while Trump has pushed other European countries to stop buying oil that he says funds Moscow’s war machine, Orban used his first trip to the White House since Trump’s return to power to push for
LANDMARK: After first meeting Trump in Riyadh in May, al-Sharaa’s visit to the White House today would be the first by a Syrian leader since the country’s independence Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa arrived in the US on Saturday for a landmark official visit, his country’s state news agency SANA reported, a day after Washington removed him from a terrorism blacklist. Sharaa, whose rebel forces ousted long-time former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad late last year, is due to meet US President Donald Trump at the White House today. It is the first such visit by a Syrian president since the country’s independence in 1946, according to analysts. The interim leader met Trump for the first time in Riyadh during the US president’s regional tour in May. US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack earlier
RSS