By Jun Ji-hye
South Korea and the United States have agreed to share and jointly analyze information on the underwater environment in North Korean waters in a bid to better respond to Pyongyang’s submarine-launched missile threats, officials here said Sunday.
The agreement was reached during an annual bilateral meeting held in June of a committee dedicated to discussing the allies’ anti-submarine capabilities, according to officials.
The committee was launched last year in the wake of the North’s first underwater test-fire of a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) in May in that year.
During the meeting, the two sides agreed to analyze underwater information in the waters surrounding the two Koreas including waters off the North’s eastern port city of Sinpo, and share it with each other, a military official said on condition of anonymity.
The Sinpo shipyard in South Hamgyong Province is home to the headquarters of the Maritime Research Institute of the Academy of National Defense Sciences, the North’s primary submarine manufacturing facility.
“The measure by Seoul and Washington is to enhance allies’ abilities to conduct anti-North Korean submarine operations in event of a contingency,” the official said.
On Wednesday, Pyongyang successfully test-fired an SLBM from waters near Sinpo, which flew about 500 kilometers and landed in waters under Japan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (JADIZ) in the East Sea. The latest test showed a significant improvement from past tests, indicating that the North may have acquired the technology to allow a missile to fly as well as the cold-launch technology necessary to launch a missile from the water.
Defense officials here are reportedly looking at the possibility that the North will be able to effectively deploy SLBMs by the end of this year.
“The underwater environment information necessary to conduct military operations includes submarine topography, water temperature, depth of water and tidal current,” the official said. “Those are variables that would change a refractive index of sound waves detected by a sonar system.”
The official added that Seoul and Washington will strengthen surveillance and information analysis on possible infiltration routes of the North’s submarines in the West Sea especially near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), known for its fast current and frequent changes in the underwater environment.
Military sources say the U.S. is currently mobilizing its nuclear-powered submarines to covertly collect the underwater information in the remote North Korean waters of the East Sea. They noted that about 10 nuclear submarines are deployed at a U.S. naval base in Guam.