U.S., Japan OK Accord on Missile Defense

SEOUL — The United States and Japan agreed Friday to strengthen cooperation on missile defense amid concerns about a possible long-range test launch by North Korea.

The accord came as U.S. forces ended five days of Pacific military exercises, the largest in the region since the Vietnam War. Three aircraft carriers, along with 25 other ships, 22,000 troops and 280 warplanes took part in the exercises off Guam.

In Washington, the head of the Pentagon’s missile defense program said Friday that he was confident that interceptor rockets would destroy a long-range North Korean missile if President Bush gave the order to attack it.

From “what I have seen and what I know about the system and its capabilities, I am very confident,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said when asked about the likelihood that one of the 11 missile interceptors based in Alaska and California would succeed in bringing down the long-range North Korean missile that U.S. intelligence says is being prepared for a possible launch.

Japanese Foreign Minister Taro-Aso and U.S. Ambassador J. Thomas Schieffer signed documents in Tokyo about cooperation on ballistic missile defense development. Japan’s Defense Agency also said a high-resolution radar that can detect a ballistic missile had been deployed at a base in northern Japan.

The U.S. has warned North Korea that a launch could have serious repercussions.

“We still hope that they recognize that launching that missile would only isolate them further, and that they will make the right decision and not launch the missile,” Alexander Vershbow, the U.S. envoy to South Korea, said in Seoul.

At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador John R. Bolton expressed concern about North Korea’s silence over a possible missile launch and called for sustained pressure on the regime in Pyongyang, especially from China, to stop it.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters Friday that testing a long-range missile “in a region like the Korean peninsula, at a time when we have lots of difficult issues ... is not a wise thing to do, and North Korea must listen to what the international community is telling it.”