Intercontinental. Able to go from one continent to another. This Thursday morning, North Korea not only launched a new missile capable of traveling a great distance, but it calibrated it in such a way that it fell 170 km from the Japanese coast.
The missiles
The device launched by Pyongyang would have left from the vicinity of Sunan, in the west of the country, near the international airport of Pyongyang. It flew at an altitude of 6,000 km for 1,080 kilometers, for 71 minutes before crashing in the waters off the west coast of Japan, inside the exclusive economic zone of the archipelago, near of Hokkaido, the northernmost main island of Japan.
Japan, a country whose defense depends essentially on the American protection negotiated since the end of the Second World War, is separated from Korea only by the Sea of Japan, the area of which barely reaches twice the size of mainland France. In August 2016, North Korea had already fired a ballistic missile in the Japanese maritime economic zone.
higher, further
This is the eleventh test that North Korea has carried out since the beginning of the year, under the guise of working on the launch of satellites. And each time, the tested missile appears to sail higher, longer and faster than the previous flight. Hwasong-15, the last North Korean ICBM tested, reached an altitude of 4,475 km with a range of 950 km and a flight time of 53 minutes. Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korea Studies in Seoul, says data indicates the object launched on Thursday could have a maximum range of around 15,000 km, depending on the weight of the object. warhead carried, which is 3,000 km more than the Hwasong-15.
“Given the situation in North Korea, it is more cost effective to manufacture additional nuclear warheads for a given missile than to manufacture many missiles and the launch pads that go with them,” said Ankit Panda, senior analyst for the nuclear issues from the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Why now ?
Since 2018 and high-profile meetings with foreign leaders, including former US President Donald Trump, Pyongyang had observed a moratorium on testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and nuclear weapons. Kim Jong Un’s goal was to obtain the suspension of international sanctions that weigh on the economy of the most isolated country in the world. But the talks have still yielded nothing. And, between the consequences of Covid-19, officially non-existent in Korea, and the severe drought which has reduced harvests for two years, the population is enduring significant deprivation.
The war in Ukraine offers a new context. It is currently unthinkable for Washington, Moscow and Beijing to agree on new sanctions against Pyongyang, when in 2017 the three powers had in concert banned exports of North Korean coal and ore in particular.
“North Korea may be trying to take advantage of global concerns about the war in Ukraine to impose its status as a nuclear-weapon state,” Leif-Éric Easley, associate professor at CNN, told CNN. international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
An anniversary date could also explain this calendar. Analyzes of the firings carried out on February 26 and March 4 showed that several elements of the Hwasong-17 had been tested. The “monster missile”, presented as the star of a military parade in Pyongyang last October, is in principle capable of carrying several conventional or nuclear warheads on independent trajectories, difficult to intercept by American defense systems. After break-in flights of separate elements, analysts believe that the weapon could be inaugurated on April 15. The “Day of the Sun” is the most important date on the North Korean political calendar, more so this year for the 110th anniversary of the birth of its founder, Kim Il Sung, the “eternal president of the Democratic People’s Republic” and a hero of the resistance to the occupier… Japanese.
In response, South Korean missiles
Each North Korean shot calls for a reaction from the South, political and diplomatic. For the first time since 2017, Seoul responded by launching several warning missiles. Less than two hours after the North Korean launch, South Korea fired a Hyunmoo-2 missile, its main ballistic missile, carrying increasingly powerful warheads, and an army tactical missile system. South Korean aircraft also fired two JDAM anti-bunker missiles.
“Our military is monitoring the movements of the North Korean military and has confirmed that we have the capability and posture to accurately strike the missile launch origin location and command and support facilities whenever North Korea launches a missile,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff JCS said.
Three weeks ago, South Korea chose a conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, who, although he does not take office until May, has already begun to approach the North Korean question more rigidly than his predecessor. Moon Jae-in, who had worked to bring the two enemy brothers closer together, moreover condemned the launch more vehemently: “President Kim Jong-un himself broke the moratorium on ICBMs that he had promised to the international community”, which causes “a serious threat”, he reproached.
International condemnation
The North Korean launch is an “unacceptable act of violence”, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Thursday from Brussels where he is for the G7 summit. In a statement, the White House denounced the shooting, which “unnecessarily increases tensions and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region”. These “brazen violations” of UN Security Council resolutions show that the North Korean Republic “continues to prioritize its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs over the well-being of its people. “, continued the White House, calling on Pyongyang “to come to the table for serious negotiations”. “The door is not closed on diplomacy, but Pyongyang must immediately cease its destabilizing actions”, adds the press release, while Joe Biden was in Belgium this Thursday for a G7 summit and an extraordinary NATO summit, two diplomatic meetings intended to align the position of Western leaders in the face of Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.