On Monday, the U.S. military allowed reporters to check out a THAAD system on Guam, a move that Stars and Stripes described as a bid to help the South Korean government convince the public that the defense battery is safe and necessary for national defense. “This action of placing a THAAD in South Korea is widely supported in the U.S. Congress as an appropriate step to addressing the very real and serious missile threats posed by North Korea”.
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He added that the decision to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) can be seen as part of the existing arrangement, and thus does not call for parliamentary approval.
A South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff official said: “Our assessment is that it was done as a show of force”.
The U.S. Strategic Command also confirmed the North’s “launch of two presumed Scud tactical ballistic missiles, followed by the presumed launch of a Nodong intermediate-range ballistic missile approximately an hour later”.
North Korea has fired three ballistic missiles into the sea off its east coast, USA and South Korean officials confirmed Tuesday.
South Korea’s Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn said Tuesday that missile tests had been “a rare phenomenon in the past”, but have been occuring “continuously” this year.
The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. In an apparent protest against THAAD, the North also test-launched a submarine-launched ballistic missile, just a day after the decision was announced. He said the South is closely watching the North’s moves.
The launch comes one day after the USA military revealed its advanced Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, battery in Guam to South Korean media on Monday.
North Korea’s state radio has recently broadcast strings of indecipherable numbers, Seoul officials said Tuesday, in a possible resumption of a Cold War-era method of sending coded messages to spies operating in South Korea.
The UN Security Council has slapped a series of sanctions against the hermit state that ban North Korea from conducting ballistic missile tests.
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“We know how valuable THAAD is on Guam and this deployment will complement the battery permanently stationed on our island”, Bordallo said, upon the disclosure by USA and South Korean officials.
