US and South Korea to update wartime plans for North Korea

SEOUL—The U.S. and South Korea said they would update their joint wartime contingency plans for North Korea, as the Kim Jong Un regime has kept pursuing military advances amid a stall in nuclear talks.

During a visit to Seoul, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, alongside his South Korean counterpart, approved an update to the strategic guidance used for wartime operation plans, a document that hadn’t been updated since 2010. The precise nature of the review, or what might change, wasn’t immediately disclosed.

A decade ago, Kim Jong Il, the current dictator’s father, was still alive. Pyongyang had yet to showcase intercontinental ballistic missile technology capable of striking the U.S. mainland, which it did in November 2017. In recent years, North Korea had refrained from nuclear tests or ICBM launches. But in recent months, the Kim regime has unleashed smaller-range tests, including new submarine-launched ballistic missile technology and a weapon fired from a train.

North Korea’s missile and weapons pursuits are “increasingly destabilizing for regional security,” said Mr. Austin, who was in Seoul for an annual U.S.-South Korea security consultative meeting. He added that the Biden administration remains committed to a diplomatic approach with North Korea, though one “obviously backed up by a credible deterrent and military readiness.”

The new war-plans guidance will reflect changes to the strategic environment and enable Seoul and Washington to “more effectively deter—and as necessary respond to—DPRK threats,” according to a joint U.S.-South Korea communiqué, referring to the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Washington will also maintain its current level of U.S. military personnel stationed in South Korea, about 28,500 people, South Korean Defense Minister Suh Wook said at a Thursday news conference with Mr. Austin.

The U.S. and North Korea haven’t engaged in formal nuclear talks in more than two years. The Biden administration’s outreach to the Kim regime has gone ignored. In September, Mr. Kim said the U.S. threat against North Korea had remained “utterly unchanged” under President Biden.

Throughout the pandemic, North Korea has sealed off its borders, dealt with continuing sanctions and suffered economic losses. The country says it has experienced zero Covid-19 cases. It has rejected vaccines offered through the Covax initiative, a program financed mostly by Western governments to help lower-income countries obtain doses. Covax has recently assigned 4.7 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines to North Korea.

Earlier this week, North Korean state media acknowledged the Omicron variant. The country’s health officials are engaged in an all-out effort to ensure a “perfect state emergency epidemic prevention system,” state media reported.

Mr. Kim has warned this year that the country faced food shortages and even instructed officials to embark on an “Arduous March,” a reference to the 1990s famine that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The North Korean leader’s weight loss, framed by state media as sacrificial hardship, became national news.

But at a Politburo meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Kim struck a more upbeat tone, noting the positive changes made this year to overall state affairs, with “stable management” of the economy and “big successes” in agriculture and construction, state media reported.

Those successes “give self-confidence in a fresh victory of our own-style socialism,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying. “The appraisal of this year by the Party Central Committee is that it is the one of victory in general.”

North Korea will hold a Workers’ Party plenum in late December to set 2022 goals, state media reported. The planned meeting will happen around the 10th anniversary of when Mr. Kim was elevated to power after his father’s 2011 death.

Write to Timothy W Martin at timothy.martin@wsj.com