South Korea is assembling a "decapitation unit" in its military in a thinly veiled threat to North Korean leader Kim Jung Un and his top aides as they escalate a nuclear missile program, The New York Times reported.
South Korean defense minister, Song Young-moo, told lawmakers a special forces brigade known as Spartan 3000 — which he described as a "decapitation unit" – would be established by the end of the year, the Times reported.
Though there was no announcement it would target the North Korean leader, the Times reported the brigade eerily recalls a commando unit in the 1960s that conducted a failed assassination attempt aimed at Kim's grandfather, Kim Il Sung.
"The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong Un fear for his life," Shin Won-sik, a three-star general who was the South Korean military’s top operational strategist before he retired in 2015, told the Times.
The measure has raised questions about whether South Korea and the United States are laying the groundwork to kill or incapacitate Kim and aides before they can order a nuclear attack.
"We can now build ballistic missiles that can slam through deep underground bunkers where Kim Jong Un would be hiding," Shin said, referring to President Donald Trump's agreement that would allow South Korea to build more powerful ballistic missiles.
"The idea is how we can instill the kind of fear a nuclear weapon would — but do so without a nuke. In the medieval system like North Korea, Kim Jong Un’s life is as valuable as hundreds of thousands of ordinary people whose lives would be threatened in a nuclear attack."
According to the Times, as word of South Korea’s new assassination plans has spread, Kim has used his deputies’ cars as decoys to move from place to place.
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