S Korea, US to raise missile range limit

Updated October 07, 2012 22:01:43

South Korea has announced a deal with the United States to almost triple the range of its missile, effectively putting all of the communist North within striking distance.

Under a pact signed with Washington a decade ago South Korea's rocket range was limited to 300 kilometres and a warhead payload of 500 kilograms.

But Seoul has long argued that its range needs to be extended to meet North Korea's ballistic missile threat.

Today the South announced it had struck a new deal with the US allowing it to deploy missiles with a range of 800 kilometres, meaning it can strike anywhere in the communist North.

"The biggest purpose of the revision is curbing military provocations by North Korea," national security advisor Chun Yung-Woo told reporters.

The extension will not only bring the whole of North Korea within reach of Seoul's rockets, but also parts of China and Japan.

The US stations 28,500 troops in South Korea and guarantees a nuclear "umbrella" in case of any atomic attack. In return, Seoul accepts limits on its missile capabilities.

Given the ambitions of North Korea's missile program, Seoul has long made the case for the range limit on its rockets to be extended and negotiations with the US took on a new urgency after a failed rocket launch by the North in April.

Pyongyang insisted its aim was to put a satellite into orbit, but the US and its allies saw the failed launch as a disguised long-range missile test banned under UN resolutions.

Mr Chun said the new deal, which will take the range of South Korea's missiles well beyond the Missile Technology Control Regime's (MTCR) limits, was aimed at "securing a more comprehensive response to missile threats" by the North.

The maximum payload for the maximum 800-kilometre range will remain at 500 kilograms, but Mr Chun stressed the two parameters were inversely linked, so that for shorter ranges corresponding payload increases would be allowed.

There was no immediate comment from the US state department, but Washington has previously made it clear it considers South Korea a special proliferation case, given the threat posed by the North.

But analysts warned the new deal may accelerate an arms race in northeast Asia and weaken Seoul's arguments against the North's nuclear and missile programs.

"The South certainly has every right to defend itself from threats of the North," said Yang Moo-Jin of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.

"But the deal is really a double-edged sword and goes against the wider global efforts to reduce weapons of mass destruction."

He also suggested it could strengthen a "vicious circle" in which the communist North uses the deal as another excuse to stiffen its resistance to calls to halt its nuclear program.

The six-party atomic disarmament talks on the North - which group the two Koreas, the US, China, Japan and Russia - have been at a standstill since the last meeting in December 2008.

In March 2009, the North walked out of the aid-for-denuclearisation process and conducted its second nuclear test a month later.

North and South Korea have remained technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

Seoul believes Pyongyang has 1,000 missiles of various types, many of them targeted at the capital or other locations in the South.


Topics: world-politics, korea-republic-of, korea-democratic-people-s-republic-of, united-states

First posted October 07, 2012 16:34:45