North Korea will bolster up its war deterrence if the United States and South Korea deploy a high-altitude missile defense system on the peninsula, Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said Thursday.
The warning came amid growing speculations that the U.S. could deploy a Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense battery on South Korean soil to counter missile threats from the North. Seoul and Washington have yet to reach consensus on the deployment.
“What the U.S. seeks in this deployment is to round off its preparations for mounting a preemptive strike at the DPRK and create favorable conditions for containing China and Russia,” an unidentified spokesman of the North’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement carried by the (North) Korean Central News Agency.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s full name.
The THAAD deployment will make the Korean Peninsula into “a theater of fierce scramble” among big neighboring powers and bring about another Cold War in the Northeast Asia region, the statement noted.
“The more desperately the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces resort to their war drills and arms buildup against the DPRK, the further the latter will bolster up its war deterrence to cope with them,” the foreign ministry said.
Touching on recent joint military drills between Seoul and Washington, the North also said the military exercises are meant “to push it (the North) to taking strong counteractions,” so the U.S. can press for the deployment of the THAAD on the peninsula.
No official decision has been made on the THAAD deployment, Seoul officials insist, amid a growing voice of opposition from China, which fears greater U.S. presence in the region.
The North Korean statement also came as Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Seoul earlier in the day for talks on ways to boost the bilateral alliance, possbily including the THAAD deployment issue. (Yonhap)
