Defense chiefs of S. Korea, U.S, Japan to meet in Tokyo to discuss N.K. threats

The defense chiefs of South Korea, the United States and Japan will hold talks in Tokyo next week to discuss issues such as strengthening their trilateral security cooperation in response to North Korea's nuclear and missile threats, the South's defense ministry said Monday. The gathering scheduled for Sunday comes amid tensions on the Korean Peninsula over North Korea's repeated launches of trash-carrying balloons toward South Korea in a tit-for-tat retaliation for anti-Pyongyang leaflets that North Korean defectors in the South send to the North using balloons. In response, South Korea conducted anti-Pyongyang broadcasts through its border loudspeakers in full-scale for the second day Monday Defense Minister Shin Won-sik and his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Lloyd Austin and Minoru Kihara, will assess the regional security situation and North Korea's threats as well as ways to step up their three-way security cooperation and institutionalize such efforts, according to the ministry. Bilateral talks be tween the defense chiefs of South Korea and the U.S., and South Korea and Japan will take place on the sidelines of the trilateral meeting, it added. The defense chiefs last met on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore in June, where they agreed on strengthening security cooperation against evolving North Korean threats and launching their first-ever trilateral multidomain Freedom Edge exercise. The exercise wrapped up in late June. Source: Yonhap News Agency