“China is gravely concerned with the course of action taken by South Korea,” a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said in the statement. A key hurdle to the South Korean ambition has been a treaty the South signed with Washington in the 1970s in return for American help in building its missiles. South Korea wants to double the upper limit of the payload to a ton, officials here said. (South Korea can already load warheads weighing up to two tons on ballistic missiles with shorter ranges, but those missiles cannot reach key missile bases in northern North Korea.) Advertisement Continue reading the main storyChina and Russia supply nearly all of North Korea’s oil imports and also host tens of thousands of North Korean workers.

Source: New York Times July 29, 2017 10:26 UTC