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U.S. soldiers trained in dealing with weapons of mass destruction are taking part in a large-scale military exercise with South Korea, the senior U.S. military official in the South said yesterday (see GSN, March 10).
(Mar. 11) -
A member of the U.S. Marine Corps' Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team Pacific, left, speaks with South Korean marines during a U.S. naval base defense drill today. U.S. military experts in WMD response are taking part in a major exercise with South Korea, a U.S. official said yesterday (Kim Jae-hwan/Getty Images).
"They are here for this exercise and if we ever went to war, they would naturally come also," U.S. Army Gen. Walter Sharp told journalists in Seoul, the Associated Press reported.
He said the anti-WMD troops were running through simulations with South Korean military personnel on finding, securing and disposing of North Korea's stockpile of unconventional weapons.
Pyongyang is thought to possess adequate reserves of bomb-grade plutonium to create a minimum of six nuclear weapons. The aspiring nuclear-armed nation left multilateral nuclear negotiations in 2008 and carried out its second nuclear test last May.
Seoul believes the North possesses between 2,500 and 5,000 tons of chemical warfare materials and is working on a long-range missile intended to target the United States. It is also thought to have the ability to produce biological weapons.
"What we are training for is all the threats that North Korea can throw at us," Sharp said.
Roughly 18,000 U.S. soldiers are taking part in the 10-day joint military exercise scheduled to conclude March 18.
North Korea, in response, placed its military on combat alert. It called the event a prelude to a nuclear attack and warned that it would boost its own nuclear deterrent. Pyongyang, however, typically greets the annual exercise with harsh rhetoric and no major incidents have yet to result.
"We have done these exercises before," said U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. "These should not be a surprise to North Korea."
Sharp said the nearly 30,000 U.S. soldiers deployed in South Korea are ready to respond to any situation with the North. He also urged Pyongyang to return to paralyzed denuclearization talks (Kwang-Tae Kim, Associated Press/Yahoo!News, March 11).
"On a tactical level we work very hard every day to make sure we're prepared to deal with the long-range artillery north of the Demilitarized Zone that could bring a lot of destruction to Seoul," the general said in a report by Agence France-Presse (Agence France-Presse I/Google News, March 11).
China announced today that Seoul's top diplomat, Yu Myung-hwan, would meet next week in Beijing with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi as part of an international bid to bring the North back to the six-party process. Japan, Russia and the United States are also involved in the multilateral talks, AFP reported (Agence France-Presse II/Al Manar TV, March 11).