SEOUL — U.S. troops stationed in South Korea were forced this year to scrap a contingency plan for the collapse of Kim Jong Il's regime in North Korea because of objections by Seoul, the South Korean government said Friday.
Seoul's rejection of the classified plan, which was supposed to be developed jointly by the U.S. and South Korean militaries, is the latest sign of tension in the alliance.
The strategy, code-named Op-Plan 5029, mapped out military responses in the event that Kim suddenly lost power and the communist country started to come apart.
South Korean officials apparently feared that the United States would take command in case of a power vacuum and that it would hastily send its troops toward Pyongyang, perhaps under the flag of the same U.N. command that waged the 1950-1953 Korean War.
South Korea, which considers the entire Korean peninsula its rightful territory, wants to take the lead if the North Korean system collapses.
"Aspects of the plan could be a serious obstacle to exercising South Korea's sovereignty," South Korea's National Security Council said Friday in a terse statement confirming that the plan had been scrapped. It was canceled in January, but the move was confirmed only Friday after leaks appeared in the South Korean press. The South Korean Defense Ministry also confirmed the cancellation.
U.S. officials in Seoul declined to comment.
"We don't discuss operational matters," said Lt. Col. Deborah Bertrand, a spokeswoman for U.S. forces in South Korea.
Derek J. Mitchell, a former Pentagon official now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the scrapped plan was supposed to address the possibility of a mass exodus of refugees and securing North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
"In the aftermath of Iraq, I think they felt we might be too eager to go in there [North Korea] and take control and that perhaps the Bush administration is looking for an excuse to effect regime change," Mitchell said. "The essential trust that should underlie an alliance with so much at stake is lacking."
With South Korea the world's 12th-largest economy, some in its government bristle at clauses in the defense treaty that would allow the U.S. to take command in another war on the Korean peninsula. Disagreements about command structure have been a source of tension in the U.S.-South Korean military alliance.
