South Korea seeks to build more missiles
North Korea’s launch of ICBM ramps up tension
The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea announced Saturday that it will soon start talks with the Trump administration about allowing Seoul to build more powerful ballistic missiles to counter the North, but current and former U.S. officials said the move would have little effect on the most urgent problem facing Washington: North Korea’s apparent ability to strike California and beyond.
The South’s newly elected president, Moon Jae-in, called for the relaxation of limits on its missile arsenal hours after the North launched an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, 2,200 miles into space, which landed its warhead just off the coast of Hokkaido, the northernmost Japanese island. Experts quickly calculated that the demonstrated range of that test shot, if flattened out over the Pacific, could easily reach Los Angeles and perhaps as far as Chicago and New York, though its accuracy is in doubt.
The new missiles that South Korea wants, in addition to being able to strike deep into the North, could be a way of pressuring China to restrain Pyongyang, because the missiles would likely be able to hit Chinese territory as well.
Mr. Moon’s top national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, called his White House counterpart, Gen. H.R. McMaster, early Saturday Seoul time to propose that the allies immediately start negotiations to permit South Korea to build up its missile capabilities. Mr. McMaster agreed, which would likely involve increasing the payload on South Korea’s ballistic missiles, according to officials in both countries.
South Korea needs approval from the U.S. to build more powerful missiles because of a bilateral treaty.
There are still questions over whether the North can shrink a nuclear weapon to fit atop its intercontinental missiles, or keep it from burning up on re-entry into the atmosphere.
But at the Pentagon and inside U.S. intelligence agencies, there was a sense that the North had now crossed a threshold it has long sought: Demonstrating that if the U.S. ever threatened the regime of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader and grandson of the country’s founder, it had the ability to threaten death and destruction in the continental United States.
The U.S. has lived with that threat from Russia and China for decades, but the last four U.S. presidents have all said the country could not take that risk with a government as unpredictable as North Korea’s.
Hours after Friday’s test, former U.S. officials said President Donald Trump’s options were limited.
“In the White House you have a threshold decision: Can you get them back to the table or not,” Mark W. Lippert, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Seoul, said Saturday about negotiating with the North Koreans — a step Mr. Trump said during the 2016 campaign, and again several months ago, he was willing to try. Mr. Lippert said he supports Washington’s current diplomatic efforts as well as UN sanctions against the North.
But so far, the North has not responded, perhaps calculating that it first wanted to demonstrate it was a permanent member of the club of nuclear-armed nations, and able to strike U.S. cities, to strengthen its position before any negotiation.
Mr. Lippert, speaking at a conference in Kent, Connecticut, said that barring negotiations, “the question gets binary pretty quick: containment or some kind of military operations.”
Others question whether this administration, immersed in its own internal upheavals, can focus on the problem.
“It takes a president of the United States who has the intellectual, global and historical depth” to deal with the Korean crisis, said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Bush administration.
Some believe the U.S. will simply learn to live with the North’s new capability, despite the words of Mr. Trump and his predecessors.
“We are left in a situation where they believe we will ultimately acquiesce,” said Christopher R. Hill, an American diplomat who led nuclear negotiations with North Korea during the last Bush administration, which resulted in the dismantlement of part of a plutonium reactor. Mr. Hill is now dean of the Korbel School at the University of Denver.