Global Security Newswire

A senior South Korean security official said today the nation needs an arsenal of conventional weapons that would counter North Korea's WMD capabilities, the Yonhap News Agency reported (see GSN, Nov. 6, 2009).

"Unless North Korea gives up its quest for weapons of mass destruction, South Korea will not be able to overcome its military inferiority to the North," Lee Sang-woo, who leads the Presidential Commission for National Security Review, said during an event in Seoul.

"South Korea must have non-nuclear, precision-strike capabilities and that would be the only way to curb and incapacitate the North's weapons of mass destruction," he added.

Lee did not offer additional details on the weapons he believes the South must possess for this mission.

While U.S. and South Korean forces in the Asian state are seen as stronger than the North's military, there are increasing worries about Pyongyang's missiles and its suspected biological and chemical weapons stockpiles, Yonhap reported. The Stalinist state also reportedly holds a stockpile of plutonium that could be used to power six nuclear weapons (see related GSN story, today).

There have apparently been no U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea since 1992 (Yonhap News Agency, Sept. 15).