USS Carl Vinson
On January 10 the two nations reprised the drills on a more modest scale, with the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and the destroyers USS Gridley and USS Stockdale joining the Japanese destroyer JS Kurama and helicopters from both nations in naval maneuvers in the East China Sea. The three American warships, joined by the guided missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill, then headed for South Korea. Vinson and Bunker Hill visited Busan, where last October the guided missile destroyer USS Lassen participated in the first Proliferation Security Initiative [8] exercise hosted by South Korea. In all ten warships and fourteen nations -" including Australia, Canada, France and Italy -" participated in what was codenamed Eastern Endeavour 2010.
Since the sinking of the Korean corvette Cheonan last March and President Obama's upbraiding of Chinese President Hu Jintao over the incident three months later [9], the official rationale for regular U.S. war games in East Asia have been the actions of North Korea.
But the deployment of an Aegis class warship capable of launching Standard Missile-3 anti-ballistic missiles -" USS Lassen -" off the coast of South Korea in a drill nominally aimed at monitoring the "trafficking of weapons of mass destruction" and the dispatching of one of the U.S.'s eleven nuclear supercarriers to the East and South China Seas have nothing to do with putative threats from Pyongyang.
Confirmation of that fact recently appeared in an unlikely location. The official armed forces publication Stars and Stripes ran a feature on January 11 entitled "China real reason for South Korea, Japan military pact?"
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