Seoul eyes 800km missiles by 2017
By Lee Tae-hoon
South Korea plans to mass produce and deploy ballistic missiles capable of striking any target within North Korea by 2017, a senior government official said Monday on condition of anonymity.
“The military has set aside $2.4 trillion won ($2.16 billion) for the development and deployment of missiles with ranges of 550 and 800 kilometers for the next five years,” he said.
The official said the Ministry of National Defense (MND) has included 500 billion won explicitly for this plan in its proposal for next year’s budget of 34.6 trillion won to the government.
“The deployment schedule of new missiles with longer ranges and heavier warheads will depend on whether the Assembly approves the budget or not," he said.
A senior military official confirmed the plan, saying the deployment of longer range missiles can be shortened to three to four years because the country has accumulated nearly all necessary technology to make them.
“The country has enough technology to develop prototypes within two years if the National Assembly fully supports the military’s plan,” he said, noting that the initial deployment of new missiles can be made as early as 2016. “It will probably take another two years for the testing and manufacturing of them.”
The remarks came a day after Seoul announced that it reached an agreement with Washington that would allow it to nearly triple the range of its missiles to cover all of the communist North.
Senior presidential security secretary Chun Yung-woo said Washington agreed to lift South Korean ballistic missiles from the current 300 kilometers to 800 kilometers, a distance far enough to reach the northern tip of North Korea from Pohang, North Gyeongsang Province.
He said the two also agreed to a “trade-off” clause under which Seoul will be able to possess ballistic missiles with payloads of roughly 1,000 kilograms if their ranges are reduced to 550 kilometers. Seoul will be allowed to put warheads of up to 2 tons on ballistic missiles if their ranges are restricted to 300 kilometers.
Maj. Gen. Shin Won-sik, policy planning director at the MND, said South Korea has completed nearly all of the research and development work necessary for churning out longer range missiles because there have never been any formal restriction on developmental activities, including the production of a prototype.
"We have constantly pursued missile technology to accommodate future technology adjustment levels," he said, adding that the deployment will be decided in "an appropriate time" depending on the budget and other circumstances.
Neighboring countries, including Russia, China and Japan, had no immediate response to the missile guideline amendment, but China’s official news agency Xinhua expressed concern.
“The extension, however, runs counter to a global arms control agreement known as the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), an informal and voluntary association of 34 countries with a goal of stopping the spread of unmanned delivery systems capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction,” it wrote.
Defense ministers of South Korea and the United States are expected to discuss how to integrate the Korean Air and Missile Defense System with the U.S. satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles to better counter North Korean missile attacks in the upcoming Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) slated for later this month in Washington.