Seoul seeks to revise missile pact with US

By Lee Tae-hoon

Korea is pushing to revise a bilateral pact with the United States that limits the former’s ballistic missile range to 300 kilometers with a maximum payload of 500 kilograms by early 2013, a government source said Monday.

He pointed out that Seoul has the upper hand in ongoing negotiations with Washington as it plans to purchase as much as 14 trillion won ($12.3 billion) of weapons from abroad next year, mostly from the United States.

“The United States will be pressured to take Korea’s growing calls for the revision of the bilateral pact seriously as it is eager to sell weapons such as the Global Hawk, which carries a payload of 1 ton and flies more than 22,000 kilometers,”the source said.

According to a military source, Korea is also seeking to buy long-range cruise missiles with a range of 370 kilometers and a warhead of 450 kilograms from the United States for 400 billion won.

Citing an unnamed government official, the Munhwa Ilbo claimed Monday that the Lee Myung-bak administration plans to conclude its ongoing negotiations with Washington by the end of its term in office, February 2013.

“The government aims to increase the military’s maximum ballistic missile range from 300 to 800 kilometers and the warhead mass from 500 to 800 kilograms,” the paper reported.

There have been growing calls to revise the pact following the North’s development of long-range missiles and its conducting of nuclear tests, as well as a series of provocative acts.

Some argue that the range should be more than 1,000 km to bring all of North Korea within reach and the payload weight to more than 1 ton.

Top officials from the Ministry of National Defense and Cheong Wa Dae neither confirmed nor denied this.

However, they admitted that Seoul has been actively seeking to amend the bilateral pact.

“We agree on the need for seeking additional measures as North Korea’s ballistic missile capability has more than doubled in the past 10 years,”a senior defense official said, asking for anonymity.

A senior Cheong Wa Dae official concurred with him, but stressed that Seoul is not in a position to make public its position due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Korea last revised the ROK-U.S. missile guidelines in 2001 after purchasing some 220 Army Tactical Missile Systems, surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 300 kilometers, from the United States.

Before then, the range was limited to 180 kilometers.

A military insider noted that South Korea agreed to impose restrictions on the condition that Washington provides technology transfer and overlooks copying of its ballistic missiles by Seoul in developing short-range missiles.

He also pointed out that the United States sought the missile restriction as a penalty for Seoul’s push to secretly develop nuclear weapons under the Park Chung-hee military regime.

The North is believed to have developed intermediate-range missiles that can travel 3,000 kilometers, which would make Japan and U.S. military bases in Guam vulnerable targets.

The Korean Peninsula is roughly 1,030 kilometers long and 300 kilometers wide, which is roughly half the distance between the inter-Korean border and the northern tip of North Korea.