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White House sending THAAD to South Korea as 'soon as feasible'
The US military is to deploy a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) counter missile battery to the Republic of Korea (RoK) as quick as possible, the White House said on 10 October in response to an official protest.

"The United States is working with the RoK to deploy this system as soon as feasible in order to more safely defend our RoK ally and US military personnel deployed to the region from the North Korea nuclear and ballistic missile threat," read the statement. A written petition decrying the deployment, created in July, garnered enough signatures (more than 100,000) to warrant a response.

The petition called the looming THAAD deployment "a controversial move that will likely … escalate tension in the region, by provoking North Korea, China, and Russia into a spiralling arms race in the region that is already heavily militarised".
That's pretty foolish. All THAAD does it make it more difficult for someone firing missiles at you to hit something. It's a defensive weapon. The protesters are reading right out of the old Soviet playbook of the late 1970s / early 1980s with the Pershing missile kerfuffle in Germany...
The White House said the move is necessary "to improve the missile defence posture of the US-RoK Alliance". After years of speculation and discussions, Washington and Seoul agreed in July to deploy THAAD, although details of the deployment are still being worked out. It is expected that a THAAD battery could deploy to South Korea sometime in 2017.

South Korean officials changed the initial plan to base the system at an artillery facility near the town of Seongju, but this met with significant opposition from locals and in late September a new location for the system was revealed to be Lotte Skyhill Country Club in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province, which is farther from densely populated areas and 680 m above sea level (300 m higher than the previously selected location).

Other details of the deployment are to be discussed during an RoK-US Security Consultative Meeting to be held on 20 October in Washington.
Posted by: Steve White 2016-10-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=470038