South Korea seeks to boost weapons after North’s test

SEOUL — 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, 2,300 miles into space. Experts quickly calculated that the demonstrated range of that test shot, if flattened out over the Pacific, could easily reach Los Angeles and San Francisco 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.

Moon’s top national security adviser, Chung Eui-yong, called his White House counterpart, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Saturday to propose that the allies immediately start negotiations to permit South Korea to build up its missile capabilities. McMaster agreed to the proposal, which would probably 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 under the terms of a bilateral treaty.

The United States sent two supersonic bombers over the Korean Peninsula in a show of force against North Korea after the country’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile test.

The U.S. Pacific Air Forces said the B-1 bombers were escorted by South Korean fighter jets as they performed a low-pass over an air base in South Korea before returning to Guam. The mission was a response to the consecutive tests by North Korea this month.

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 government of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, 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 past 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 Trump’s options are limited.

“In the White House, you have a threshold decision: Can you get them back to the table or not?” Mark Lippert, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Seoul, said Saturday about negotiating with the North Koreans — a step Trump said during the 2016 campaign, and again several months ago, he was willing to try. Lippert said he supports Washington’s current diplomatic efforts as well as United Nations 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.

Lippert, speaking at a conference in Kent, Conn., said that barring negotiations, “the question gets binary pretty quick: containment or some kind of military operations.”

Some analysts believe the U.S. will simply learn to live with the North’s new capability, despite the words of Trump and his predecessors.

“We are left in a situation where they believe we will ultimately acquiesce,” said Christopher 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. Hill is now dean of the Korbel School at the University of Denver.