Bloomberg:
U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter arrived for talks in Seoul on Thursday after North Korea fired a pair of short-range missiles in the face of U.S.-South Korean military exercises.
“If it was a welcoming message to me, I’m flattered,” Carter told reporters in Tokyo before flying to South Korea. The launches are “a reminder of how tense things are on the Korean peninsula. That’s the reason I’m going.”
Carter’s three-day visit comes as the allies’ demonstrate their combined military heft, seeking to deter North Korea from making good on threats to test another nuclear device. The most extensive live-fire drills of this year’s exercises still ring in the ears of the regime in Pyongyang, which has slammed them as agitation for nuclear war. The U.S. and South Korea say they are purely defensive.
North Korea fired two surface-to-surface missiles on Tuesday into its western waters, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok told reporters Thursday.
“These are missile launches so it reinforces the missile defense preparations we’ve long had on the Korean peninsula,” Carter said.
The annual drills by the U.S. and South Korea elicit strong responses from North Korea — two years ago it tested a nuclear weapon and it usually fires volleys of rockets. They serve as a reminder to Kim Jong Un that the government in Seoul is backed by the U.S. military, as both countries press him toward the negotiating table on his nuclear ambitions after world powers reached a preliminary deal with Iran.
North Korea has staged three nuclear tests since 2006, added to its missile stockpile and seems increasingly willing to use them, according to a senior U.S. defense official, who asked not to be named in accordance with the department’s rules.
Response Preparedness
“The U.S. and South Korea need to be prepared to respond,” Bruce Bennett, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, said by e-mail. “They need to show strength to deter Kim Jong Un from trying more diversionary tactics or serious diversionary conflict, seeking to convince him that such actions will fail and only undermine his power.”
The Foal Eagle exercises reached a climax late last month with U.S. and South Korean troops firing rockets from helicopters and blasting tank-shells across a sandy valley on the South Korean side of the border.
Colonel David Womack, a U.S. Stryker Brigade commander, said after live-drills on March 25 that they were “a reflection of our alliance.”
“We bring infantry, aviation, artillery and then a lot of things combined together we call mission command, and that’s what makes this more lethal,” Womack said…
