SEOUL (AP) – The United States (US), South Korea and Japan conducted perhaps their biggest-ever combined naval exercises in a show of strength against nuclear-armed North Korea, South Korea’s military said yesterday. The three allies’ senior diplomats were to meet in Seoul to discuss the worsening standoff with Pyongyang.
The training in waters off South Korea’s Jeju island, which involved an American aircraft carrier, 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, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been on a provocative run of weapons testing and threats that raised regional tensions to their highest point in years.
On Monday at Pyongyang’s Parliament, Kim declared 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. He said South Koreans were “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.
Kim’s speech came a day after the North conducted its first ballistic test of 2024, which state media described as a new solid-fuel, intermediate-range missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead.
In response to the North’s heightened testing activity, the US and its Asian allies have been expanding their combined military exercises.
Kim condemns the demonstrations as invasion rehearsals, and the drills increasingly feature major US military assets, including aircraft carriers, long-range bombers and nuclear-capable submarines.
