South Korea, Japan, US conduct fresh naval drills

SEOUL: South Korea, Japan and the United States conducted combined naval exercises involving an American aircraft carrier in their latest show of strength against nuclear-armed North Korea, Seoul’s military said on Wednesday, before the three allies’ senior diplomats meet in the South’s capital to discuss the deepening standoff with Pyongyang.

The training in waters off South Korea’s Jeju island came as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un continues a provocative run in weapons testing and threats that has raised regional tensions to their highest point in years.

At Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament on Monday, Kim declared in a speech that North Korea would abandon its long-standing commitment to a peaceful unification with South Korea and ordered a rewriting of North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of a shared statehood between the war-divided countries.

The speech came a day after the North conducted its first ballistic test of 2024, which state media described as a new solidfuel intermediate range missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead, reflecting its push to advance its lineup of weapons targeting US military bases in Guam and Japan.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the trilateral naval drills, which completed their three-day program on Wednesday, involved nine warships from the three countries, including US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and Aegis destroyers from South Korea and Japan.

The exercise was aimed at sharpening the countries’ combined deterrence and response capabilities against North Korean nuclear, missile and underwater threats, and also training for preventing illicit maritime transports of weapons of mass destruction, it added. It didn’t specify whether the training reflected concerns about Pyongyang’s alleged arms transfers to Russia to help that country’s war in Ukraine.

In Seoul, South Korean nuclear envoy Kim Gunn was scheduled to meet with his Japanese counterpart Namazu Hiroyuki on Wednesday, a day before their trilateral meeting with Jung Pak, US President Joe Biden’s deputy special representative for North Korea, to coordinate their response toward Pyongyang.

In the face of growing North Korean nuclear threats, the conservative government of South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has been expanding military cooperation and training with the US and Japan, which Kim has decried as invasion rehearsals.

Yoon has also sought stronger reassurances from Washington that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear capabilities to defend its ally in the event of a Pyongyang nuclear attack.

In his speech at his country’s Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim described the South Koreans as “top-class stooges” of America who were obsessed with confrontation, and repeated a threat that the North would annihilate the South with its nukes if provoked.