South Korean president denies US weapons claim

South Korea’s president has dismissed claims from North Korea that US nuclear weapons are deployed in the South, a news report said today.

“There is no US nuclear weapon in South Korea,” the South’s Yonhap news agency quoted president Roh Moo-hyun as saying, during a joint news conference with New Zealand’s prime minister Helen Clark in her country’s capital, Wellington.

“It is an acknowledged fact that the US nuclear umbrella doesn’t presuppose the deployment of nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula,” Roh, who was on a visit to New Zealand, was quoted as saying.

His remarks came in response to comments by North Koreans, quoted by the Russian news agency Interfax, that Pyongyang will not dismantle its nuclear weapons because the United States has such weapons in South Korea.

Yesterday, the US State Department reaffirmed that there are no American nuclear weapons in South Korea.

Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Washington has been saying since 1994 that it has no nuclear armaments in the South.