WASHINGTON (AP) — If the Singapore summit put North Korea on a path to eliminating its nuclear weapons, as President Donald Trump says it has,…
WASHINGTON (AP) — If the Singapore summit put North Korea on a path to eliminating its nuclear weapons, as President Donald Trump says it has, then it also may have poked a hole in the Pentagon’s main argument for a multibillion-dollar expansion of homeland missile defenses.
The Singapore declaration by Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Kim agreed to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” It did not define a process, say when it would begin or say how long it might take.
Even so, Trump tweeted afterward, “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
Trump’s own administration later contradicted him by saying the threat remains. But if Kim does disarm, then Congress may see less logic in spending $6 billion or more to expand a missile defense system based in Alaska that is designed mainly with North Korea in mind. The Alaska system, which consists of 44 missile interceptors that would be launched from underground silos to shoot down enemy missiles streaking toward the United States, is not the only element of U. S. missile defense. But it is among the most expensive and is due to expand over the next five years.
“If real progress is made in restraining or even eliminating North Korea’s missile arsenal and production, it would remove the main driver for national missile defense,” said Jon Wolfsthal, who was national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden and is now director of the Nuclear Crisis Group, focused on preventing the use of nuclear weapons.
The U. S. military has numerous defenses against nonstrategic missile threats, such as those that would endanger U. S. or allied troops on the Korean Peninsula or in Europe. But the only one designed to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, aimed at the U. S., like those North Korea has been building, is the Alaska system.
