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| South Korean Ballistic Missile (left) & Cruise Missile (right) |
By Zachary Keck
South Korea says it tested a new ballistic missile with a range of 500 km, and that’s only the start.
On Friday South Korea announced it had test fired a new, longer range ballistic missile and has plans to further increase the range of its ballistic missiles in the future.
According to Reuters, South Korea’s Defense Ministry made the announcement in response to a question during a press briefing. When asked if South Korea had recently tested a 500 kilometer (km) range missile before, the spokesperson replied: “We test-fired it, and we succeeded. And we’re going to make 800-km missiles.”
Under the terms of a 2001 bilateral agreement with the United States, South Korea had previously maintained a ban on domestically produced ballistic missiles with ranges exceeding 300 km and payloads larger than 500 kg. In October of 2012, however, the two sides announced a new agreement which would allow South Korea to extend the range of its ballistic missiles to as much as 800 km, in effect giving it the ability to target any position in North Korea without allowing it to substantially threaten third countries like China and Japan.
Initially, South Korea had said it planned to procure these 800 km ballistic missiles by 2017. However, South Korean military officials reportedly moved up the timeline to 2015 following North Korea’s third nuclear test and subsequent bellicose rhetoric in the spring of last year. The announcement of the tests of 500 km ballistic missiles seems to confirm these reports.
Read the full story at The Diplomat