South Korea warns of unconventional warfare

SEOUL - North Korea has raised the number of its special forces troops, who are trained to infiltrate South Korea, by 20,000 to 200,000 in the past two years as it increasingly focuses on unconventional warfare, South Korea said Thursday.

It warned in a defence ministry white paper that North Korea has arrayed long-range artillery along the two Koreas’ border that is capable of a “massive surprise bombardment” on Seoul and it deployed a new, faster, more powerful tank called the Storm Tiger.

“Threats from North Korea’s asymmetric warfare capabilities - such as special forces, artillery pieces and weapons of mass destruction - have been on a steady rise since 2008,” Deputy Defence Minister Chang Kwang Il was quoted as saying by the Yonhap News Agency.

Yonhap reported that military officials in Seoul said North Korea’s ageing conventional weapons could not compete with the technological advantage of the South Korean and US militaries so they are increasing their development and use of unconventional weapons, such as low-cost missiles and improvised explosives.

The white paper, which is released every other year, said the number of North Korean soldiers, 1.19 million, was unchanged from 2008 while its number of tanks had risen from 3,900 to 4,100.

It did not specify how many Storm Tigers had been deployed but said they were similar to Russia’s T-50s and were fitted with 125-millimetre or 115-millimetre guns.

South Korea has 650,000 soldiers and is home to 28,500 US troops.

The paper was released after tensions spiked this year on the Korean Peninsula following the March sinking of a South Korean warship, which killed 46 sailors and which Seoul blamed on Pyongyang, and North Korea’s shelling of a South Korean island near their disputed border in the Yellow Sea. That attack killed two soldiers and two civilians.

The white paper upgraded North Korea to an “enemy”, raising it from the “serious threat” or “direct and serious threat” contained in the North Korean assessments since 2004 but did not go as far as white papers from 1995 to 2000 when North Korea was determined to be the South’s “main enemy”.

“The North poses a serious threat to security by developing and augmenting massive conventional military capabilities and weapons of mass destruction, such as nuclear weapons and missiles, and through constant armed provocations like the torpedo attack on the Navy corvette Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island,” the paper said. “As long as the threat continues, the North Korean regime and military, the perpetrators of all such provocations, are an enemy.”

Chang said the label was meant as a strong message to Pyongyang and emphasised that the regime there and its military were the antagonist, not its people.

“Not using the expression ‘main enemy’ does not mean that we softened our stance,” Chang was quoted as saying.

The white paper indicated the South would take a harder line against the North after the government in Seoul and its military were criticised for taking too slow and too lax a response to the Yeonpyeong artillery attack.

Concern has also risen about the North’s nuclear programme after it showed a visiting US scientist a previously unknown uranium-enrichment facility said to contain 2,000 centrifuges.

Uranium enrichment could give North Korea, which conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009, a second avenue to producing nuclear bombs after reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium.

The two Koreas remain technically at war after an armistice and not a peace treaty ended the 1950-53 Korean War.