Tag: South Korea

Seen here are mini gold bars for sale at the Gold Exchange in downtown Seoul on April 17, 2017. Gold demand has sharply increased this month as it is deemed a “safe asset” amid widely circulated rumors on “an April Korean Peninsula crisis” accruing from North Korea’s military provocations. According to the exchange, about 400 bars are sold a day currently, compared to some 100 a day in previous months. (Yonhap)

US Vice President Mike Pence says the era of strategic patience is over.  So I wonder what they are going to call their new North Korea policy then, the “All Options on the Table” policy?:

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence on Monday warned North Korea against testing America’s mettle with its saber-rattling, saying Washington will defeat any use of military force with an “overwhelming and effective” response.

During a press conference with South Korea’s Acting President and Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, Pence also reassured South Korea that Washington’s security commitment to its Asian ally is “ironclad and immutable.”

“North Korea will do well not to test his (Trump’s) resolve or strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region,” Pence said, noting the U.S. president’s recent decision on military action in Syria and Afghanistan.

“We hope to achieve this objective (Pyongyang’s denuclearization) through peaceful means, but all options are on the table,” he added.  [Yonhap]

You can read the rest at the link.

Could you imagine what would happen to South Korea if their nuclear reactors were struck by North Korean ballistic missiles causing multiple Fukushima like disasters across the country?:

South Korea’s nuclear power reactors have not been designed to deal with military attacks, a report submitted to a lawmaker by the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) showed Sunday.

The evaluation sent to Rep. Kim Jong-hoon of the conservative Liberty Korea Party revealed that the outer protective wall of local reactors were never meant to withstand a missile strike or other forms of concerted attacks.

The reinforced concrete walls are the last barrier built around reactors that can contain radioactive materials from being leaked into the surrounding area in the event of a serious accident.

“They have been designed from the outset only to remain standing in the face of typhoons, earthquakes and other forms of natural disasters,” the lawmaker said. He pointed out that the casing can deflect the blast of explosions and debris from the inside, although not from external strikes or even the kind of terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.  [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link, but this just goes to show the importance of missile defense which certain people in South Korea actually want to handicap and leave critical infrastructure like this with less protection.

In survey, majority of Korean content companies report losses from #China's THAAD backlash: https://t.co/CzmWnRLBCN #kpop #hallyu #한류 pic.twitter.com/qtkXDlXOAN

— KEI (@KoreaEconInst) April 13, 2017

A foreign woman married to a South Korean man casts a ballot at a multicultural center in Seoul on April 14, 2017, as part of a hands-on program in the runup to the May 9 presidential election. (Yonhap)

The Vice Chairman of the Seoul Financial Forum has come out against the deployment of THAAD to Korea:

James Rooney, vice chairman of the Seoul Financial Forum, said that South Korea will suffer unwanted consequences for its deployment of a U.S. missile defense system, describing the move as a “self-inflicted” mistake.

He said that South Korea needs to keep the U.S. engaged but not at the expense of antagonizing China through inappropriate access to the latter for either Washington or Japan through a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.

“Bringing THAAD onto the Korean Peninsula is the most thoughtless thing that South Korea has done in a long time,” Rooney told The Korea Times.

He said that THAAD is next to the worst solution to solve the North Korea nuclear issue. He believes that it will further sour relations among neighbors and escalate geopolitical tension in the region

“THAAD is an unnecessary and distracting sideshow from much bigger and urgent issues that need to be addressed today, both within Korea and in the neighborhood,” he said.

“But it will not go away by ignoring it, and China’s issues with it will not change just because we want to argue the case differently,” he added. “We need to respect their opinion and take actions accordingly.”

Using the example of a spy cam, Rooney, a professor of international finance at Sogang University, explained why China is so sensitive to the missile defense system.

“Imagine your next door neighbor installed a spy cam system that enabled him to look over into your garden and could even tell what was going on inside your house,” he said.

His argument was that he installed it to watch out for thieves and villains coming from the other direction and has nothing to do with the neighbor.

“You cannot imagine why your neighbor would want to give this party access to information about themselves like this, but you certainly do not want any third parties to have greater abilities to monitor you and potentially threaten you with defensive weapons,” he said.

It is claimed that THAAD is purely defensive, but he said that there is no good reason to believe that the claims made for its defensive capabilities will play out to prevent loss of human life in the future.

“Many may not realize that it actually adds to the potential for death and destruction in the neighborhood because once it is installed there will be a temptation for the targeted adversary to test it to see what happens,” he added. “That temptation is not present if THAAD is not present.”  [Korea Times]

You can read the rest at the link.

Mr. Rooney’s spy camera claims are only valid if you assume that the US currently has no sensors to track Chinese ballistic missile launches.  Does anyone really think the US has no sensors right now to track Chinese missile launches?  Does Mr. Rooney know that two identical AN/TPY-2 radars, identical to the one THAAD uses is located just across the water from Korea in Japan.  Why didn’t China complain about the installation of those radars.  Plus if THAAD in Korea is going to be used to spy on Chinese ballistic missile launches, it is pointed in the wrong direction of where China’s ballistic missile test range is located at.

The THAAD radar is not a 360 radar, like other missile defense systems such as Patriot, it is a directional radar pointed towards the enemy ballistic missile threat.  To look towards western China the radar would have to be completely turned away from North Korea making it useless to defend against ballistic missiles fired from North Korea.  Plus if the radar is turned towards western China satellite surveillance from China would easily detect this and would validate their current claims.  The US military is not stupid and knows they can’t point the radar towards China with no one noticing.

Then Mr. Rooney’s claim that North Korea would actually launch something at THAAD “to see what happens” is very unlikely.  Launching a ballistic missile into South Korea could be interpreted as an act of war and met with a heavy response.  Plus all across South Korea the US and the ROK military already have Patriot missile batteries deployed at key locations.  The North Koreans have never launched a ballistic missile into South Korea “to see what happens” with those systems.  THAAD like Patriot is missile defense system, just with greater range to shoot down more capable threats the North Koreans have developed that the Patriot system has less capability to shoot down.

The reason why China is opposed to THAAD is the simplest answer which is they are attempting to create a wedge in the US-ROK alliance.  I think it will ultimately fail considering how even the left wing ROK politicians favored to win the ROK presidency have now come out to support the THAAD deployment.

There is a reason that Northeast Asia has been stable since the end of the Korean War after decades of conflict and that is the US military presence in the region.  Doug Bandow from the libertarian Cato Institute disagrees:

But that world disappeared long ago. The Korean Peninsula has lost its geopolitical significance, South Korea its helplessness, and America’s Korea commitment its purpose. While there is much to criticize in the approach of Donald Trump’s administration to the rest of the world, the president correctly sees the need for a foreign policy that more effectively protects America’s interests. A good place to start shifting course is the region home to the world’s newest and least responsible nuclear power.

The Koreas are no longer a proxy battleground between superpowers. There was a time when U.S. withdrawal from a confrontation with a Soviet ally in Asia would have, analysts believed, signaled weakness a continent away in Europe. But the Soviets are long gone and the cause for American commitment with them. An inter-Korean war would be tragic and the body count enormous, but absent American involvement the fighting would largely be confined to the peninsula. The continued presence of U.S. forces, by contrast, virtually guarantees the spread of conflict.

South Korea’s defense no longer requires Washington’s presence. The South’s economy began racing past its northern antagonist during the 1960s. Democracy arrived in the late 1980s. By the 1990s, when mass starvation stalked Pyongyang as Seoul’s economy boomed, the gap between the two Koreas was already huge and growing. The South’s military potential is correspondingly great though as yet unrealized — in part because dependence on the U.S. presence has affected strategic choices.  [Foreign Policy]

You can read the rest at the link as well as read my prior analysis of why USFK withdrawal will not happen any time soon at this link.

Two child monks touch each other’s head after attending a shaving and Buddhist confirmation ceremony at a Buddhist temple near the eastern coastal city of Sokcho on April 14, 2017, ahead of Buddha’s Birthday that falls on May 3. (Yonhap)

I wonder how long she has been getting away with this?:

Police have booked a 20-year-old woman for allegedly stealing two gold bracelets and hiding them in her buttocks at a jeweler’s shop in central South Korea earlier this month, they said Wednesday.

The Heungdeok Police Station in Cheongju, North Chungcheong Province, said the woman, along with her 21-year-old friend, visited the shop on April 1 and browsed the bracelets on display. She repeatedly put her hand into her pants while the other woman was talking to an employee over the purchase of a ring.

According to the police, the shopowner found that two bracelets, worth 980,000 won (about US$856), were gone. The woman was later spotted picking them up in CCTV footage.

She denied the allegations and demanded that the shop call the police to determine whether she stole them, saying that she wore a pair of leggings and had nowhere to hide them.

Two female police officers arrived at the shop and conducted a strip search in a bathroom near the shop after getting the suspect’s consent, eventually obtaining her confession that she had hidden them in her buttocks.  [Yonhap]