Park said South Korea must not provide few-strings-attached large-scale aid to North Korea “like in the past”.
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The deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, is opposed by North Korea, China and Russian Federation.
North Korea’s rocket launch is now being considered by Western powers as a test of a banned missile technology.
In North Korea, leaders have rockets named after them.
OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea (AP) – Four U.S. F-22 stealth fighters flew low over South Korea on Wednesday in a clear show of force against North Korea, a day after South Korea’s president warned of the North’s collapse amid a festering standoff over its nuclear and missile ambitions.
The US has some 28,000 military personnel based in South Korea.
Critics say the system could help US radar spot missiles in other countries.
“It is a shift from an ideal North Korea policy to a realistic North Korea policy”, Mr Choi said.
“Given the recent experience with the January 6 test – namely that North Korea appears to have altered its past test preparation practices in order to make them more hard to detect – it may well be that the North could conduct another detonation with little or no warning”, said the 38 North website, operated by the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
It is unusual for a top South Korean official to publicly touch on such a government collapse because of worries about how sensitive North Korea is to talk of its authoritarian government losing power.
Following Pyongyang’s rocket launch, Seoul announced it will begin talks with Washington on deploying a sophisticated USA missile defense system in South Korea and that the allies’ upcoming springtime military drills will be the biggest ever. Pyongyang has long accused Washington and Seoul of agitating for its collapse.
“If time passes without any change, the Kim Jong-Un leadership – which is speeding without a brake – could deploy a nuclear-tipped missile and we will suffer”, she said.
China praised the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il on Tuesday on the anniversary of his birth, saying he made important contributions in developing ties with China.
The ministry did not detail how it arrived at that conclusion. During an interview with Reuters on February 12, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi added the new principle of demanding the guarantee of China’s legitimate national security interests to its previous approach to addressing the North Korean nuclear issue, which has consisted of using dialogue and negotiations to bring about the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
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Her comments are likely to trigger an angry response from the North, which is already smarting from the President’s unprecedented decision last week to shut down the operations of South Korean companies at the jointly-run Kaesong industrial estate in North Korea.
