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The United States and South Korea signed a new pact to deter North Korea's potential use of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction amid growing threats from Pyongyang, The defense ministers also agreed to review the timing of the transfer of war-time command control of their combined forces on the Korean peninsula from the U.S. military to SouthKorea, a joint statement issued after their meeting said. The transfer is scheduled to take place in December 2015, but there have been calls in South Korea for it to be postponed while North Korea continues to push ahead with its nuclear weapons and long-range missile programmes.

The ministers did not give any immediate indication of what the "tailored deterrence" strategy might entail despite questions from the media. Hagel said it was prompted by a recent push by Pyongyang to build and deploy nuclear weapons. North Korea conducted its third nuclear test in February, two months after successfully launching a long-range rocket that put an object, which Pyongyang says was a satellite, into space. Intelligence analysis indicates North Korea has restarted a Soviet-era nuclear reactor at its main Yongbyon atomic complex, which previously produced plutonium that experts believe was used to build up to 10 nuclear weapons.