US Throttles Intelligence-Sharing With South Korea After Nuclear Disclosure Row

The United States has reduced intelligence sharing with South Korea pertaining to eavesdropping on North Korea following an alleged leak tied to sensitive information, according to local media reports.

But it is a major allegation that the government has dismissed as ‘absurd’. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung took to X at the start of this week to write, “Any claim or action based on the premise that Minister Chung ‘leaked classified information provided by the US’ is wrong.”

Bloomberg, citing Yonhap and others, wrote that “South Korean media reported that the US is limiting intelligence sharing on North Korea with Seoul after Unification Minister Chung Dong-young publicly identified North Korea’s uranium enrichment facility in Kusong last month.”

Washington reportedly began limiting access earlier this month to certain intelligence linked to North Korea’s technological capabilities, widely believed to involve aspects of its nuclear program, according to Yonhap News.

“It’s true that the US side has been restricting sharing parts of North Korean intelligence collected through satellites from early this month,” a senior military official said. “(The restricted sharing of intelligence) is related to information regarding parts of North Korea’s technology.”

Some 28,500 US troops are permanently stationed in South Korea, and the US is a longtime military partner going back to the Korean War of the mid-20th century. US intel-sharing has always heavily assisted Seoul with missile warning data and satellite surveillance.

The whole rare episode stems from remarks by South Korea’s Unification Minister Chung Dong-young during a March 6 parliamentary session, when he openly identified Kusong as a third North Korean uranium enrichment site alongside facilities at Yongbyon and Kangson.

The speech marked a first official acknowledgment by Seoul of the Kusong site, which then triggered backlash from Washington, featuring complaints from US officials through diplomatic and military channels who viewed it as a potential exposure of sensitive, possibly shared intelligence.

Chung in turn rejected the accusations, framing his remarks as all based in open source and public data which can be found through research reports.

Pyongyang is probably enjoying the spectacle, having long vehemently denounced the US presence on the Korean peninsula, also given the sporadic docking of a US nuclear submarine. This is a very rare moment of tensions among allies on the Korean peninsula.