China on Monday called for restraint after the United States flew a B-52 bomber over South Korea in a show of force to North Korea following its globally condemned fourth nuclear test.
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Pyongyang said it detonated an underground device on Wednesday, to widespread condemnation, but experts remain sceptical about the claim.
“After North Korea conducted a nuclear test, its military may stage unexpected provocations”, Lee said when visiting the U.S. airbase in Osan with commander of United States forces in South Korea Curtis Scaparotti. Other strategic assets under consideration reportedly include a US aircraft carrier, a nuclear-powered submarine and F-22 stealth fighters.
“The United States and South Korea are continuously and closely having discussions on additional deployment of strategic assets”, said Kim Min-seok, a spokesman at the South Korean defence ministry, declining to give specifics.
In Washington, the USA official said they were discussing deploying “the whole range” of such assets but this meant such things as nuclear-capable bombers rather than restoring US nuclear weapons to South Korea for the first time in about a quarter century. Currently, about 800 South Koreans are staying overnight at the complex each day.
In August 2015 when South Korea resumed the psychological warfare to respond to what Seoul claimed was land mine explosions orchestrated by DPRK forces, it took just 10 days to trigger an exchange of artillery fire in border areas between the two Koreas.
North Korea will nearly certainly see the flyby as a provocation, but so far has not issued an official response.
A man watches a news report at a railroad station in Seoul on January 6, 2016, after seismologists detected a 5.1 magnitude tremor next to North Korea’s main atomic test site in the northeast of the country.
The B-52 Stratofortress is a long-range strategic bomber and part of the U.S. Pacific Command’s continuous bomber presence in the Indo-Asia-Pacific, Pacific Command said.
Officials added that North Korea’s speakers have low output, which leads them to believe that the goal is to merely prevent the South’s broadcasts from being heard.
As worldwide sanctions punishing Pyongyang for its first three nuclear tests appear to have failed in reining in the North’s nuclear program, China is increasingly seen as the only real power with leverage over the Kim Jong-un regime.
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But Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week after Pyongyang’s announcement that US policy toward North Korea has been an “abject failure” for the past several decades.
