US and South Korean defense chiefs updated a key military agreement against nuclear-armed North Korea for the first time in a decade, hailing their "stronger than ever" alliance.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Seoul for an annual security meeting with his South Korean counterpart Shin Won-sik, as the allies step up defense cooperation in the face of rising missile and nuclear threats from Pyongyang.
At the Security Consultative Meeting, defense chiefs reviewed the Special Deterrence Strategy (SDS), an agreement on joint strategies to deter and counter North Korea's nuclear and other weapons, according to a joint statement.
The revisions mean the deal will allow allies to more effectively "deter and respond to the DPRK's (editor's note: DPRK - Democratic People's Republic of Korea) advancing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and non-nuclear capabilities with strategic implications," it said.
The document was originally adopted in 2013. Allies worked to update it to better reflect the rapidly changing international environment.
This year, Seoul and Washington staged joint military exercises involving advanced stealth jets and US strategic assets.
A US nuclear submarine visited a South Korean port in July - the first in four decades - while a US B-52 heavy bomber landed on the Korean peninsula "for the first time this century", Austin noted at a joint news conference after the meeting.
"I am proud to say that our union is stronger than ever," he declared.
Despite the many conflicts around the world, Seoul's Defense Minister Shin Won-sik stressed that Seoul and Washington maintain "the most powerful alliance in history and the world."
"If North Korea provokes a war, the regime of Kim Jong Un will be eliminated and what will be achieved will be unification based on the liberal democratic order led by the Republic of Korea," he added.
Senior officials agreed to work closely to "expand the scale and types of field exercises" in line with next year's combined exercises.
Given the DPRK's growing nuclear and missile capabilities and the institutionalization of its nuclear force policy, Washington and Seoul will hold a drill in which a potential nuclear strike by North Korea will be taken into account. /BGNES
