SEOUL: Top security advisors for Seoul, Tokyo and Washington will meet in Seoul Saturday to discuss the growing threat posed by nuclear-armed North Korea, South Korea’s presidential office said.

The meeting — which will be attended by Seoul’s Cho Tae-yong, Tokyo’s Takeo Akiba and Washington’s Jake Sullivan — comes about a month after the defence chiefs of the three allies agreed to activate a real-time data-sharing operation on North Korean missile launches, starting from December.

Pyongyang last month successfully put a military spy satellite into orbit and has since claimed its eye in the sky was already providing images of major US and South Korean military sites.

The three allies have led a chorus of global condemnation of the North for violating multiple UN Security Council resolutions, which bar it from tests using ballistic technology, used in both missiles and space launch rockets.

The upcoming meeting will discuss “in-depth ways for cooperation between South Korea, the US, and Japan on regional security issues including North Korea, global issues, and economic security,” South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol’s office said in a statement.

The event is taking place in accordance with the agreements reached by the allies’ leaders at a three-way summit hosted by US President Joe Biden at Camp David in August, it added.

Yoon’s conservative government has also made a concerted effort to improve historically strained ties with Japan, the country’s former colonial ruler.

The Camp David meeting marked the first time the three leaders had met for a standalone summit, rather than on the sidelines of a larger event.

Pyongyang’s leader Kim Jong Un has described the burgeoning defence alliance of the three countries as “the worst actual threat” facing his isolated country, which has been drawing closer to traditional allies Russia and China.

The North’s November military satellite launch has since fractured an inter-Korean military agreement established to de-escalate tensions on the peninsula, with both sides ramping up security along the DMZ.

AFP