U.S. missile shield bound for Guam in Korean crisis
KOREAN TENSIONS WASHINGTON — The United States announced Wednesday that it was deploying an advanced missile defense system to Guam, to protect one of the main American naval and air bases in the Pacific against North Korean attack. The North renewed its threat to launch a nuclear attack on the United States.
Pentagon officials say that the decision to rush the missile shield to Guam was “a precau- tionary move to strengthen our regional defense posture against the North Korean regional ballistic missile threat.”
But its primary importance is that, once installed, the land-based system will free up two Aegis-class missiledefense warships to be repositioned far closer to the North Korean coast. That will give President Barack Obama more options to decide whether to attempt to shoot down the North’s increasingly sophisti-
cated arsenal of missiles, perhaps during a North Korean missile test.
“We haven’t made any decisions,” a senior administration official said. “But we want as many options as possible.”
Pyongyang, for its part, said America’s everescalating hostile policy toward North Korea “will be smashed” by the North’s nuclear strike and the “merciless operation” of its armed forces.
“The U.S. had better ponder over the prevailing grave situation,” said the translated statement.
North Korea’s threat capped a week of psy- chological warfare and military moves by both sides that have rattled the region.
Earlier Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said North Korea has “ratcheted up their bellicose, dangerous rhetoric and some of the actions they’ve taken over the last few weeks present a real and clear danger and threat.”
Despite its rhetoric, North Korea has not demonstrated that its missiles have the range to hit Guam or Hawaii, much less the U.S. mainland. Nor is it known to have a nuclear warhead small enough to be carried on its missiles. But U.S. officials said its missile capabilities have expanded in recent years more rapidly than predicted.
Asked about Guam recently, Undersecretary of Defense James Miller said the U.S. missile defense system “provides coverage of not just the continental United States, but all the United States.”
But some analysts note that the U.S. military’s own maps of the geographic reach of the ground-based interceptor shows Guam uncovered.
Defense officials said that Guam was still covered by missile-carrying U.S. warships in the Pacific equipped to shoot down ballistic missiles. Sending the ground-based system to Guam beefs up the U.S. defense.
The missile defense system, which the Pentagon said would arrive in Guam “in coming weeks,” includes a truck-mounted launcher, interceptor missiles, a tracking radar and a fire-control computer system.
It shoots interceptors designed to hit ballistic missiles in the final phase of their flight as they descend toward targets.
Tensions have escalated between North and South Korea in recent weeks. The communist North has vowed to increase production of nuclear weapons materials, and threatened a strike against the U.S.
On Wednesday, a U.S. research institute said North Korea has already begun construction at a shuttered plutonium reactor that it is vowing to restart and it could be back in operation sooner than expected.
The U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has analyzed recent commercial satellite imagery of the Nyongbyon nuclear facility, where the reactor was shut down in 2007 under the terms of a disarmament agreement. A reactor cooling tower was destroyed in 2008.
The analysis published on the institute’s website “38 North” says that rebuilding the tower would take six months, but a March 27 photo shows work may have started for an alternative cooling system that could take just weeks.
“Pyongyang may be poised to prove wrong conventional wisdom that it will take months to restart its reactor, and in the bargain it is also showing us that they mean business by accelerating the process,” said Joel Wit, 38 North editor and a former U.S. State Department official.
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters Tuesday that restarting the plutonium reactor would be “extremely alarming” but added: “There’s a long way to go between a stated intention and actually being able to pull it off.”