By Deutsche Welle
Nov 21, 2023, 08:58 AM EST
The nuclear powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson arrived on Tuesday (11/21/2023) at the port of the South Korean city of Busan (about 350 kilometers southeast of Seoul), according to the Navy of the Asian country, in a new exhibition of the deterrence mechanism established by Washington and Seoul against Pyongyang.
The ship arrives accompanied by its strike group and seeks to “increase the regular visibility of the strategic assets of the United States, fulfilling the promises of expanded deterrence and improving the combined defense posture,” the South Korean Naval Forces explained in a statement. .
The text indicates thatupon arrival of the ship is in line with the strengthening of the so-called extended or expanded deterrencewhich Washington and Seoul agreed to this year and which has implied, among other things, an increase in the frequency with which the Pentagon deploys its strategic weapons on the peninsula and the creation of the so-called Nuclear Consultation Group (NCG), a mechanism to coordinate US responses to possible North Korean attacks, including the nuclear option.
The US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, already announced last week the arrival of the USS Carl Vinson, which last visited the peninsula in 2017 and is the third US aircraft carrier to visit South Korea this year after the USS Nimitz in March and the USS Ronald Reagan in October.
“Solid combined defense posture”
Its arrival in South Korea “demonstrates the solid combined defense posture,” as well as “the firm determination to respond to the advance of North Korea’s nuclear and missile threats,” the director of the operations center states in the aforementioned statement. maritime fleet of the South Korean fleet, Kim Ji-hoon.
The arrival of the USS Carl Vinson comes hours after Pyongyang will notify a launch window that spans from November 22 to December 1 to try to put its first reconnaissance satellite into orbit, an action that Seoul and Washington consider a violation of UN sanctions, which prohibit the regime from testing ballistic missile technology.
The day before, the chief of operations of the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Kang Ho-pil, assured that Seoul will take the “necessary measures” if Pyongyang goes ahead with the launch, in apparent reference to the partial suspension of an agreement inter-Korean summit of 2018 designed to reduce military tension in the border areas between both countries, technically still at war.
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