Analysts said that North Korea is likely to make another provocation ahead of joint annual military drills between Seoul and Washington slated for late this month.
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Tensions on the Korean peninsula have run high since North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test in January, followed with a satellite launch and a string of test launches of missiles.
“The more efforts it makes, the deeper the country’s isolation in the worldwide community will be and the bigger its economic problems will be”, she said. This is not only a refusal to acknowledge the failure of her strategic judgment and the worsening relations with China but also a slap in the face of the Seongju residents, who live near the site where the THAAD system is to be deployed.
And in recent missile tests, North Korea has fired: mobile missiles that are hard to track, submarine launched missiles, also hard to track, and intercontinental missiles that can potentially reach Alaska.
“If there is another way to protect our country and people, the alternative must be presented”, Park said.
The missiles, if acquired, would replace the SM-2 missiles now fielded by South Korea’s Aegis destroyers and improve their range from about 100 miles to more than 300 miles, significantly extending their layers of missile defense. Seoul said North Korea fired first, but North Korea denied firing and responded with anger.
Many of these abuses, the report noted, are committed in the country’s political prison camps where an estimated 80,000 to 120,000 men, women and children are held.
Beijing, on the other hand, seems to have miscalculated that, in giving Seoul deliverables on history issues such as a memorial to Korean independence fighter An Jung-geun and a new Comfort Women museum in Nanjing, it could now exercise a veto power over Seoul’s defense decisions with its US ally. However, the two ally countries persistently deny these allegations and stressed that the system is purely defensive and created to cope with the military threats from North Korea.
On Monday, Park gave a speech to mark the 71st anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule.
On August 19, 2015, the armies of both sides had exchanged fire across the Korean Demilitarised Zone.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe described the launch as a “grave threat” to Japan and said Tokyo “strongly protested”.
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In a statement released by North Korea’s Committee for Peaceful Reunification, it called Park’s speech a “brazen gripe to hide the guilt of forcing the inter-Korean relations into a ruin”.
