North Korea threat grows with new forces: South report
North Korea’s immediate threat to South Korea has grown, with 20,000 more special warfare troops deployed near their border along with 200 new tanks, a defense white paper published by the South on Thursday said.
The publication of the biennial report comes as tensions on the divided peninsula are at their highest in decades following North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island in November.
The size of the North’s military remained steady from two years ago at 1.19 million troops, the defense ministry paper said, but its “asymmetrical threat” grew with Pyongyang’s continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.
South Korea has reinstated its “enemy” designation for the North after having dropped it in 2000, when the two Koreas held the first of only two summit meetings between their leaders that led to warmer ties and the start of commercial exchange.
The heightened tension has worried regional powers, with China, the North’s main ally, on Thursday repeating its call for dialogue and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin calling on the two Koreas to stop “muscle flexing.”
North Korea has deployed mid-range missiles that can hit all of South Korea and Japan and threaten U.S. military bases in Guam. The North already has hundreds of ballistic missiles that can hit most parts of the South.
The white paper kept its earlier estimate of the North’s plutonium stockpile at 40kg (88lb), which experts believe would be enough for at least five nuclear weapons.
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