Donald Trump Agrees South Korea Should Have Bigger Warheads to Face North Korea

President Donald Trump has agreed to strengthen South Korea’s military arsenal and revise the military agreement that limits the size of Seoul’s missiles, according to a South Korean statement on Trump’s call with President Moon Jae-in on Friday.

“Sharing the view that South Korea needs to bolster its defense capabilities to counter North Korea’s provocations and threats, the two leaders agreed in principle to revise the missile guidelines to a level that the South Korean side desires,” read a statement from President Moon’s office, quoted in the country’s news agency Yonhap.

Without explicitly mentioning the missile guidelines, the White House said the leaders “agreed to strengthen” their alliance and Seoul’s defense capabilities and that Trump provided his “conceptual approval” of South Korea’s purchase of American military equipment worth billions of dollars, without adding further details.

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South Korea previously asked the U.S. to review the missile guidelines in a bid to double its firepower following rising threats from the North, which flew a ballistic missile over Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido on Tuesday in its latest illegal test.

First stipulated in 1979 to contain a regional arms race, the missile guidelines have been revised only twice, in 2001 and 2012. The latest revision allowed Seoul to increase the maximum allowable missile range to 800km from the previous limit of 300km, and to load up to 500kg of warheads on the 800km-range missiles.

President Donald Trump reaches to shake the hand of South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in after making a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House June 30, in Washington, D.C. The two leaders spoke on September 1 and agreed to strengthen South Korea’s missile capabilities. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

President Moon discussed doubling the weight limit to 1 ton of warheads with Trump when they met at the end of June, as reported in the South Korean press.

Moon is also pursuing a diplomatic route to contain the threat from North Korea. When he first became president in May he proposed meeting with Kim Jong Un for talks. The two countries technically remain at war since a truce agreed to end the 1950-1953 Korean War was never followed by a peace agreement.

Despite Pyongyang’s snub of Moon’s invitations for talks in July, the South Korean president continued to emphasize the importance of dialogue with its neighbor in the phone call with his American counterpart.

The South Korean statement on the call mentions that Trump and Moon “reaffirmed their view that it was important to have North Korea come out to the dialogue table to peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear issue by applying maximum sanctions and pressure on the North.”

The White House readout of the call does not mention dialogue, which would contradict one of Trump’s tweet Wednesday about North Korea, in which he wrote that talking was “not the answer.”

The statement, quoted in Reuters, said the two leaders “pledged to continue to apply strong diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea and to make all necessary preparations to deter and defend against the growing threat posed by North Korea.”

The two leaders will speak face to face later this month on the sidelines the 72nd session of the U.N. General Assembly, the third meeting between them since Moon took office.

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Frankfurt hospitals evacuated before WW2 bomb disposal

Patients at hospitals in Frankfurt have been moved to prepare for the controlled explosion of a huge bomb left over from World War Two.

The 1.4 tonne British bomb, found on a building site on Wednesday, will be made safe on Sunday.

About 65,000 people must leave their homes and police have said they will imprison anyone who refuses to go.

It is Germany’s biggest post-war evacuation. A smaller one took place on Saturday in Koblenz.

In the city 110km (68 miles) west of Frankfurt, 22,000 people had to leave their homes for four hours while experts disposed of a World War Two bomb that had been found during preparations for building a new kindergarten.

Thousands of unexploded bombs from the war are still found in Germany every year.

Last month a kindergarten was evacuated after the teacher found an unexploded World War Two bomb on a shelf. Police said a child had found it on a woodland walk and brought it inside.

• How much of a threat are unexploded bombs?

A councillor in Frankfurt, which is Germany’s financial hub, told Reuters news agency that more than 100 patients from two hospitals were moved on Saturday.

He said they included premature babies and people in intensive care.

The fire brigade tweeted (in German) that 500 more would be moved from care homes early on Sunday.

Fire and police chiefs in the city warned that an uncontrolled explosion of the HC 4000 bomb would be powerful enough to flatten an entire street.

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The operation will take at least 12 hours and evacuees will have to leave their homes by 08:00 local time (06:00 GMT).

Police helicopters will carry heat detecting cameras to detect anyone who had not left the area before the bomb disposal experts begin their task. Police also said they would guard empty houses and apartments from burglars.

The evacuation area includes 20 retirement homes, an opera house, and Germany’s central bank where half the country’s gold reserves are stored.

The city has opened shelters for evacuees to spend the day, and most museums are opening their doors for free.

So, how many unexploded bombs are there in Germany?

An average of about 2,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance are found each year in Germany. It’s estimated that about half the 2.7 million tonnes of bombs dropped by Allied powers during World War Two landed on German soil (compared to about 74,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on the UK by Germany). Many of the bombs were equipped with malfunctioning time-delay fuses, and many never went off.

Adding to the problem are Russian artillery shells, German hand grenades and tank mines, as well as Russian munitions from training facilities in post-war East Germany.

The problem is so widespread that Germany has a bomb-disposal unit, the Kampfmittelbeseitigungsdienst (KMBD), dedicated to the problem. Its technicians are among the busiest in the world, deactivating a bomb every two weeks or so – and they estimate their work will continue for decades to come.

Do the bombs pose a real threat?

Dozens of bomb-disposal technicians and hundreds of civilians died from uncontrolled explosions in the decades following the war. The rate of fatalities has slowed since, with 11 technicians said to have been killed in Germany since 2000.

But experts warn that the devices that remain could be getting more unstable as the munitions age and their fuses grow more brittle, and as bombs are discovered in more built-up, harder-to-reach areas.

The problem is also worse in certain parts of Germany. Oranienburg, just outside Berlin, has the dubious distinction of being the “most dangerous town in Germany”. Under Adolf Hitler, it contained an armaments hub, aircraft plant, railway junction and a nuclear research facility – so it was a key target for the Allies, who gave it an aerial pounding. Almost 200 bombs have been defused in the town since the end of the war, and residents are well-drilled in the evacuation procedure. But with experts estimating that some 350-400 bombs remain buried, the task is far from complete.

Other WW2 bombs recently discovered in Germany

• May 2017: 50,000 people were evacuated from Hannover while three British-made bombs were defused
• December 2016: More than 50,000 evacuated in Augsburg over 1.8-tonne British explosive
• May 2015: 20,000 people in Cologne forced to leave their homes after a one-tonne bomb was discovered
• January 2012: A construction worker was killed when his digger hit an unexploded bomb in Euskirchen
• December 2011: 45,000 people were evacuated from Koblenz – half the total population – after two bombs were found in the riverbed of the Rhine
• June 2010: Three members of a bomb disposal squad were killed in Göttingen during an operation to defuse a bomb found on a building site

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