South Korea, the US and Japan yesterday began major new military exercises, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said, as the allies seek to counter growing threats from North Korea.
The drills, dubbed “Freedom Edge,” would focus on ballistic missile and air defenses and defensive cybertraining among other areas, the joint chiefs said in a statement.
The three countries’ leaders at a summit last year agreed to conduct drills every year to demonstrate unity in the face of North Korea’s nuclear threats and China’s rising regional influence.
Photo: AP
The drills, which are to wrap up tomorrow, would involve the USS Theodore Roosevelt nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Japan’s JS Atago guided-missile destroyer and South Korea’s KF-16 jets, among other assets.
Ahead of the drills, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol visited the Theodore Roosevelt, after it arrived in the southern port of Busan on the weekend.
The ship’s arrival prompted a response from North Korea, which said it was opening “all possibilities of demonstrating [our] overwhelming and new deterrent force.”
Yesterday’s announcement from Seoul came hours after North Korea claimed to have successfully tested its multiple-warhead missile capability.
It had “successfully conducted the separation and guidance control test of individual mobile warheads,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency said.
The “separated mobile warheads were guided correctly to the three coordinate targets” during the test, carried out the day before, it said.
“The test is aimed at securing the MIRV capability,” it added, referring to multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle technology — or the ability to fire multiple warheads on a single ballistic missile.
The South Korean military had said that the North’s test on Wednesday appeared to be of a hypersonic missile, but that the launch ended in a midair explosion.
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