A day after scrambling fighter planes in response to what seemed to be a North Korean bombing simulation, South Korea and the United States started joint maritime drills with a US aircraft carrier on Friday, according to South Korea’s military.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of South Korea said that the maritime exercises will take place on October 7-8 in the waters off its east coast.
The exercises follow North Korea’s Thursday sea launch of two ballistic missiles and subsequent flight of bombers close to the South Korean border.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff of South Korea stated, “We will continue to develop our operational capabilities and preparedness to respond to any provocations by North Korea through joint exercises with… the USS Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group.”
In response to a test on Tuesday in which North Korea fired a ballistic missile that overflew part of Japan, the US strike group has already taken part in trilateral missile defence drills with warships from Japan and South Korea this week.
In a conference call on Friday, senior defence officials from Japan, South Korea, and the United States condemned North Korean launches and concurred that recent trilateral maritime drills have improved their capacity to respond to North Korea, according to a statement from South Korea’s ministry of defence.
The South sent out 30 fighters in response to the unusual bombing exercise carried out by at least eight North Korean fighter planes and four bombers on Thursday. Warplanes descended from the sky on both sides of the heavily guarded border as tensions over Pyongyang’s recent missile launches rose.
A severe threat to the stability of the situation, according to North Korea, was posed by the US moving the aircraft carrier close to the peninsula on Thursday.
Asserting that the launches were a “fair countermeasure” to the joint US-South Korea manoeuvres, the North Korean foreign ministry also slammed Washington for requesting a UN Security Council meeting in response to the launches.
On Wednesday, the United States charged China and Russia with supporting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un by thwarting efforts to tighten sanctions against Pyongyang over its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Russia’s representative referred to the latest penalties as a “dead end,” while China stated that it wanted to concentrate on positive steps to defuse tensions.
The nuclear envoys of the United States, South Korea, and Japan held a conference call and pledged to step up efforts to stop North Korea from financing its nuclear and missile programmes by seizing digital currency, as well as to stop efforts to evade sanctions by engaging in unauthorised maritime transshipments.
