Seoul, South Korea –
North Korea on Sunday said its latest ICBM test should further bolster its “lethal” nuclear attack capability and threatened additional powerful moves in upcoming military exercises between the United States and South Korea.
The United States responded by flying in long-range supersonic bombers later Sunday in a show of force for separate joint exercises with South Korean and Japanese warplanes.
Saturday’s ICBM test, the North’s first missile test since Jan. 1, signals that its leader Kim Jong Un is using his rivals’ drills as an opportunity to expand his country’s nuclear arsenal to gain the upper hand in future negotiations with the United States win. An expert says North Korea may try to conduct regular operational exercises with its ICBMs.
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said the launch of the Hwasong-15 ICBM was organized “suddenly” without prior notice, under Kim’s direct orders.
KCNA said the launch was designed to verify the weapon’s reliability and the combat readiness of the country’s nuclear forces. The missile was said to have been launched at a high angle and reached a maximum altitude of about 5,770 kilometers (3,585 miles), covering a distance of about 990 kilometers (615 miles) in 67 minutes before firing exactly one preset Have hit territory in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
The steep angle start should obviously avoid neighboring countries. Flight details reported by North Korea, which roughly matched launch information previously assessed by its neighbors, show that the weapon is theoretically capable of reaching the US mainland if fired on a standard trajectory.
The launch of Hwasong-15 demonstrated the North’s “powerful physical nuclear deterrent” and its efforts to transform “its capability of deadly nuclear counterattack on enemy forces” into an extremely powerful uncounterable one, KCNA said.
Whether North Korea has a working nuclear-tipped ICBM is still a source of external debate, as some experts say the North has failed to find a way to protect warheads from the harsh conditions of atmosphere reentry. The North says it has acquired such technology.
The Hwasong-15 is one of North Korea’s three existing ICBMs, all of which use liquid propellants, which require injection before launch and cannot remain fueled for long periods. The North is pushing to build a solid-fuel ICBM that would be more mobile and harder to detect before launch.
“Kim Jong Un likely determined that the technical reliability of the country’s liquid-propellant ICBM force has been sufficiently tested and evaluated to now allow for regular operational exercises of this type,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Chang Young-keun, a missile expert at Korea Aerospace University in South Korea, said North Korea appeared to have launched an improved version of the Hwasong-15 ICBM. Chang said the information provided by North Korea showed the missile will likely have a longer potential range than the standard Hwasong-15.
Later Sunday, US B-1B bombers and other aircraft trained separately with South Korean and Japanese fighter jets over and near the Korean Peninsula. A statement from the South Korean military said Sunday’s training reaffirmed Washington’s “iron-clad” security commitment to South Korea.
North Korea is sensitive to the use of US B-1B bombers, which can carry an enormous payload of conventional weapons.
The North’s launch came a day after it promised an “unprecedentedly” strong response to a series of military exercises Seoul and Washington are planning in the coming weeks.
In a statement Sunday, Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s influential sister, accused South Korea and the US of “openly displaying their dangerous greed and attempting to gain military superiority and supremacy in the Korean Peninsula.”
“I warn that we will monitor every movement of the enemy and take appropriate and very powerful and overwhelming countermeasures against every move that is hostile to us,” she said.
North Korea has staunchly criticized the regular military drills between South Korea and the US as an invasion rehearsal, though allies say their drills are defensive in nature.
“We now know that any action taken by the US and South Korea – however justified from the perspective of defending and deterring (North Korea’s) reckless behavior – will be construed as an act of hostility and protested by North Korea,” said Soo Kim, Security Analyst at California-based RAND Corporation. “There will always be fodder for (Kim Jong Un) gun provocation.”
“With nuclear weapons in tow and having mastered the arts of coercion and bullying, Kim needs no ‘self-defense.’ But seeing the US and South Korea as aggressors allows Kim to justify his weapons development,” Soo Kim said.
US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said the US would take all necessary measures to ensure the security of the American homeland, as well as South Korea and Japan. South Korea’s Presidential National Security Council said it would seek to strengthen its “overwhelming response capability” against potential North Korean aggression based on the military alliance with the United States.
The South Korean and US military plan to hold a tabletop exercise this week to refine a joint response to North Korea’s possible use of nuclear weapons. The allies will also conduct another joint computer-simulated exercise and field training in March.
The foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan, who met on the sidelines of a security conference in Germany on Saturday, agreed to strengthen trilateral cooperation with the participation of the United States and exchanged detailed views on the issue of mobilizing colonial-era forced Koreans in Japan Workers – a major sticking point in efforts to improve their relations, according to the Seoul Foreign Ministry.
South Korea and Japan are both key US allies, but are often spat over issues arising from Tokyo’s colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945. But North Korea’s latest missile test is urging the two countries to consider how to increase their security cooperation.
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Associated Press writer Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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