| Japan is keeping up its guard and may beef up surveillance to be prepared in case North Korea ratchets up tensions as world attention turns to the U.S.-led war on Iraq, officials said on Thursday.
"I have not received information that North Korea will do anything beyond exercises but...we are always gathering information and making every effort to ensure that an unexpected situation does not arise, and we want to be even more careful," Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba told a news conference.
Ishiba spoke shortly before U.S.-led forces had launched an attack on Iraq.
Worries have mounted that with the world focused on Iraq, a simultaneous crisis might erupt with North Korea, engaged in a standoff over its nuclear ambitions.
Japanese and U.S. military spokesmen would neither confirm nor deny a domestic media report that the U.S. military had asked Japan to fly E-767 airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft over the Sea of Japan to help protect U.S. spy planes engaged in surveillance missions against North Korea.
Kyodo news agency said Lieutenant General Thomas Waskow, commander of the U.S. Forces in Japan, had made the request at a meeting on Sunday with Admiral Toru Ishikawa, chairman of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) -- as Japan's military is known -- Joint Staff Council and that Tokyo planned to accept the request.
"We are working together to consider a series of measures to more closely monitor continuing tensions with North Korea," said Colonel Victor Warzinski, director of public affairs for U.S. Forces Japan. "We welcome Japan's support of this effort."
A Defense Agency spokesman said U.S. forces and the SDF were always gathering information using various planes and ships.
"The SDF is always -- regardless of the North Korean situation -- gathering information 24 hours a day, using the E-2C or the E-767 (AWACS plane) and exchanging information with the United States," the agency spokesman said. "But I cannot answer questions regarding specific activities."
The United States sent two dozen long-range Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers earlier this month to the island of Guam in the western Pacific and deployed radar-evading F-117A stealth fighters to Kunsan Air Base in South Korea for use in the annual joint U.S.-South Korea "Foal Eagle" field exercise due to end on April 2. The Pentagon has also positioned the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson in the Western Pacific.
Japanese media reports have said Japan may boost the number of its missile-detecting destroyers deployed near North Korea from one to three due to fears Pyongyang might conduct a ballistic missile launch in the near future.
Tensions have been high on the Korean peninsula since October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to a secret nuclear weapons program. The standoff has escalated as North Korea test-fired missiles and intercepted a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft patrolling international airspace.
Source: Reuters | |
