Tokyo, 03 June, /AJMEDIA/
Japan, the United States and South Korea will launch a system to allow real-time sharing of information about North Korean missiles by the end of this year amid Pyongyang’s repeated ballistic missile tests, South Korea’s defense chief said Saturday.
Defense Minister Lee Jong Sup told reporters about the plan which would allow the three nations to detect and track projectiles fired by the North more accurately and swiftly. He was speaking after talks with his Japanese and U.S. counterparts, Yasukazu Hamada and Lloyd Austin in Singapore.
The first talks between the three countries’ defense ministers since June last year took place on the fringes of the three-day Asia Security Summit in the Southeast Asian city-state, an annual international forum also known as the Shangri-La Dialogue, which began Friday.
Currently, Washington has a system that links to Tokyo and Seoul individually to track Pyongyang’s missiles from launch to impact, but the two U.S. security allies in East Asia have no mechanism to share real-time information directly.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, U.S. President Joe Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol agreed at a meeting in Cambodia last November to share North Korean missile warning data in real time “to improve each country’s ability to detect and assess” the threat.
Their defense chiefs held talks after a North Korean military reconnaissance satellite launch ended in failure on Wednesday, with the three countries regarding it requiring ballistic missile technology that violates U.N. Security Council resolutions.
North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said “serious defects” appeared in an engine of the rocket carrying the satellite after the launch, and admitted it flew abnormally.
As Pyongyang has pledged to make another attempt “as soon as possible,” and its pre-declared launch window from May 31 to June 11 has yet to end, Tokyo, Washington and Seoul remain on guard over possible further launches.
Since the start of last year, North Korea has frequently carried out missile tests, with fears lingering that it may be preparing to conduct its seventh nuclear test, the first since September 2017.
The three nations have been beefing up their security cooperation against the backdrop of recent rapprochement between Japan and South Korea after Yoon took office in May last year,
Also Saturday, Hamada and Austin held a separate trilateral meeting with their Australian counterpart Richard Marles in Singapore.
