Military commanders in Seoul were ordered yesterday to speed up preparations to protect South Korea from Kim Jong-un’s regime.
President Moon said that the country needed to become more self-reliant. “The goal is to build a winning military,” he told six new commanders.
South Korea wants to increase the power of ballistic missiles it is allowed to develop under an agreement with the United States. Mr Moon is understood to have asked President Trump to support at least a doubling of the 500kg payload limit in a phone call on Monday.
The Yonhap news agency said that such missiles would be more capable of destroying North Korean bunkers. The Pentagon confirmed that it was considering the changes.
Japan is also reviewing its capabilities. Itsunori Onodera, the defence minister, will consider whether missile defences need to be upgraded.
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Some citizens are taking matters into their own hands, however, with bomb shelter companies reporting a big increase in sales across Japan.
South Korea and Japan, the two US allies within closest range of Kim’s missiles, have long worried about Pyongyang’s drive to improve its weapons technology. With tens of thousands of US military personnel stationed in the two countries, the bases are potential targets. The regime now poses a new level of threat, according to a Japanese defence paper published this week.
Two newly deployed US air force B-1B bombers carried out joint exercises with South Korean and Japanese fighter jets on Tuesday before returning to their base in the US Pacific territory of Guam. North Korea declared yesterday that it was planning “an enveloping fire” around Guam.
Regional tensions could increase this month when the US and South Korea carry out scheduled joint military exercises, which Pyongyang routinely describes as rehearsals for invasion. Lee Ki-beom, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul, said North Korea was likely to respond to those joint military drills.
The fears of those living in Japan will not have been eased by a government television advertisement, aired since June, suggesting that people take shelter in a sturdy building in the event of a missile launch. Some towns have also carried out emergency drills.
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Warnings of an incoming missile would come over an emergency loudspeaker but experts say there would not be much time to act, with North Korea having the capability to strike Japan in only ten minutes from launch.
People fishing in the waters between Japan and the Korean peninsula have voiced their fears. The intercontinental ballistic missile launched by North Korea late last month splashed into the waters near Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. “We can’t lower our guard as we don’t know when [North Korea] will launch,” a sea urchin fisherman, Takashi Tobuyama, 83, told the Kyodo news agency. “But we cannot keep looking upward in the middle of fishing.”
The concerns took on added poignancy yesterday as Japan marked the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
The US bombed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing stages of the Second World War. By the end of 1945 an estimated 74,000 people had perished in Nagasaki, while the death toll in Hiroshima reached about 140,000.
“The international situation surrounding nuclear weapons is becoming increasingly tense,” Nagasaki’s mayor, Tomihisa Taue, said at a ceremony yesterday. “A strong sense of anxiety is spreading across the globe that in the not-too-distant future these weapons could actually be used again.”
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Mr Taue criticised the Japanese government for shunning the recent United Nations talks on a nuclear weapons ban treaty.