South Korea is planning to join an exclusive club of about a dozen countries that possess aircraft carriers.
The proposed warship, designed to carry up to 20 of America’s jump-jet
F-35BLightning II joint strike fighters, will project South Korea into a higher league of maritime powers, and add another carrier to a region already engaged in a naval arms race.
Construction of the 652ft ship will begin next year and it is due to be launched in the late 2020s. The decision follows the breakdown of what initially looked like encouraging diplomatic progress between
North Korea and the US on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.
After two summits between President Trump and
Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, in Singapore in 2018 and Hanoi in 2019, hopes of a breakthrough in denuclearising the Korean peninsula were dashed. After an 18-month self-imposed freeze while the talks were going on, Pyongyang resumed short-range ballistic missile tests in May last year.
The new vessel will be about a third the size of the US Navy’s 11 nuclear-powered supercarriers, but unlike several nations that have carriers with flight decks only capable of launching helicopters, the South Korean warship will be a dedicated fixed-wing aircraft platform. It has been called LPX-II class and will be a 40,000-ton ship.