hankyoreh

U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on August 28 that North Korea does not pose an immediate military threat to South Korea, adding that South Korea does not have to be afraid of North Korea’s conventional weapons.

Rumsfeld made the comments at Fort Greeley, Alaska, prior to a meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Ivanov, according to the Associated Press (AP).

With his comments, the U.S. defense secretary showed a somewhat different position from some conservatives in South Korea, who are opposed to Korea’s takeover of wartime operational control of South Korean troops from the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), citing the threat of North Korea.

Rumsfeld said that North Korea’s conventional military power has drastically weakened following its economic deterioration, mentioning that the annual flight practice time of North Korean pilots is less than 50 hours, about a quarter of that of American pilots.

"I think the real threat that North Korea poses in the immediate future is more one of proliferation than a danger to South Korea," he said to reporters at Fort Greeley.

U.S. high-ranking military officials, in recent meetings with important South Korean figures, have also maintained that North Korea’s fighting power has sharply decreased. A leading legislator of the governing Uri Party, who visited the United States last month, said, "Pyongyang’s emergency oil stock has almost run out," quoting statistics given to him by U.S. department of defense officials. According to the lawmaker, U.S. officials think that about a third of North Korea’s fighting equipment is of no use.

Earlier than this, on April 24, National Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung said that "the North Korean military seems to be having serious trouble maintaining its equipment." During a key speech at the 13th ROK-U.S. seminar for defense at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), Yoon said that the "North Korean military performs 100 sortie aircraft training everyday, compared to South Korea’s 1,000 sortie daily training."