Will Relocating THAAD Just Move NIMBY Complaints to Another City In South Korea?

For the residents of Seongju they will need to decide if they still care about the THAAD deployment if its moved to the alternate site that is no longer in their backyard:

Residents living near a government-chosen site for a U.S. anti-missile system failed Saturday to discuss whether to review an alternative location due to opponents’ protest.

Residents of the southern county of Seongju held a meeting to discuss whether they can consider picking an alternative site for the government’s move to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) inside the county.

But they failed to reach a consensus over whether to review the alternative location as some of them insisted that the government should scrap its plan to deploy a THAAD battery on their county. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but here is a Google Earth image I put together that shows the two proposed THAAD locations:

As the image shows the problems with the THAAD deployment moves from Seongju’s backyard to Gimcheon’s.  So will the people of Gimcheon now complain about the deployment?  I guess time will tell, but that is the problem with THAAD in South Korea it will always be radiating over someones backyard.

One thing for sure is that the cost of the deployment of THAAD is going to skyrocket by having to purchase or lease the Lotte Sky Hill Golf Resort land from the Lotte corporation compared to deploying the THAAD on government owned ROK Air Force land at the first THAAD site outside of Seongju.