SEOUL: South Korea on Thursday readied plans for more live fire drills as a warning to North Korea and scheduled talks with the United States and Japan on dealing with the volatile nuclear-armed regime.
Rattled and furious after Pyongyang’s deadly artillery attack, South Korea has moved more troops and guns onto its frontline islands with the North, determined to show it will strike back hard if provoked again.
That threat is very real, the country’s spy chief warned, following the regime’s November 23 shelling of the island of Yeonpyeong which killed four people and fanned fears of a military escalation on the Korean peninsula.
“The danger of further attacks from North Korea is high,” National Intelligence Service director Won Sei-Hoon was Wednesday quoted as telling a closed session of parliament’s intelligence committee.
He said the latest attack came at a time of heightened volatility in the North, where leader Kim Jong-Il is planning to hand power to his 27-year-old son Kim Jong-Un while economic turmoil has hit the impoverished country.
In South Korea those views are now widely shared.
An editorial in the JoongAng Daily said that “undoubtedly North Korea is highly likely to make more frequent large-scale provocations in the future”, arguing that “it desperately needs them to solidify its shaky internal power succession scheme”.
South Korea and the United States on Wednesday ended their biggest ever naval war games off the Koreas and announced more drills — but not before the South holds its own exercises next week, a signal it can also fight on its own.
From Monday, its armed forces plan five days of artillery drills in 29 locations, including on flashpoint border islands in parts of the Yellow Sea that are disputed with the North, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this week.
On the same day, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan in Washington for crisis talks that will exclude China, which has refrained from condemning Pyongyang’s attack.
The United States organised the talks in Washington despite a call by China — impoverished Pyongyang’s main economic and political supporter — for an emergency meeting of envoys to the stalled six-nation negotiations on North Korean nuclear disarmament.
The negotiations — involving China, Japan, the Koreas, Russia and the United States — have agreed in the past to give aid and security guarantees to Pyongyang if it ends its nuclear programme.
The North abandoned the forum in April 2009 and staged its second nuclear test a month later. Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have responded coolly to Beijing’s call.
“We are not interested in talks, and talks are no substitute for having North Korea fulfill its international obligations, meet its commitments and cease provocations,” State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told reporters.
He said Monday’s three-way meeting “demonstrates the close coordination between the United States, Republic of Korea and Japan and our commitment to security in the Korean Peninsula and stability in the region.”
Admiral Mike Mullen, the top US military officer, meanwhile said that China needed to “step up” its pressure on North Korea and that its call for six-nation talks “will not substitute for action.”
“I believe that China’s leadership has more influence in Pyongyang than any other country — period. There is no other country that’s close,” said Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
China also refrained from blaming North Korea for the March sinking of South Korea’s Cheonan corvette, in which 46 sailors were killed. A multinational investigation panel said a North Korean submarine sunk it with a torpedo.
The North this week raised tensions when it boasted of the sophistication of a new nuclear facility which US experts warn could make weapons-grade uranium, supplementing the plutonium the North has used for bombs so far.
Mullen warned that “the ante is going up and I think… the stakes in terms of stability in the region are going up.”
