The suspected ICBM flew to an altitude of 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) and 1,080 kilometers (671 miles) with a flight time of 71 minutes before landing in waters off Japan’s west coast Thursday, according to Japan’s Defense Ministry.
Japan’s Deputy Defense Minister Makoto Oniki told reporters on Thursday that the spike indicated it was “a new type of ICBM.” The Defense Ministry confirmed that the missile landed inside Japan’s Special Economic Zone, 150 kilometers (93 miles) west of the Oshima Peninsula in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island.
The United States joined its allies South Korea and Japan in strongly condemning the launch. The White House said in a statement, Thursday, that the move “unnecessarily raises tensions and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region.”
US President Joe Biden is currently in Belgium, where he is attending the G7 summit alongside Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. The meeting is part of a series of meetings, including an extraordinary NATO summit, as Western leaders seek to align their responses to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine. The European Council meeting will also be held on Thursday.
According to analysts, the recent wave of North Korean missile tests indicates that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, is trying to show an increasingly turbulent world that Pyongyang remains a player in the struggle for power and influence.
“North Korea refuses to be ignored and may try to take advantage of the global preoccupation with the war in Ukraine to dictate its status as a nuclear weapons state,” Lev Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, told CNN.
“North Korea is not close to initiating aggression on the scale of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But Pyongyang’s ambitions similarly go beyond self-defense as it wants to overturn the security order in post-war Asia,” Easley added.
provocative action
Analysts said Thursday’s test could be the longest-range missile North Korea has launched so far.
“North Korea appears to have conducted a ‘overhead’ missile test. This is a tactic they often use to test long-range systems without flying provocatively over another country,” said Joseph Dempsey, a research associate in defense and military analysis at the International Institute. for Strategic Studies in London.
He said preliminary data for Thursday’s test suggested it could be the Hwasong-17, an ICBM much larger than the Hwasong-15 tested in 2017.
Kim Dong-yup, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the data suggested Thursday’s missile could have a maximum range of about 15,000 kilometers (9,320 miles) — theoretically making it within reach of the continental United States, depending on the weight of the warhead. Which you’ll be carrying – and farther than Hwasong-15 by about 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles).
Despite the potentially expanded range, Kim said Pyongyang has yet to prove it has mastered the technology required to enable a warhead to successfully re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in the final stages of flight.
US response
The US Indo-Pacific Command announced earlier this month that the US is ramping up “intelligence-gathering, readiness, and surveillance activities” related to North Korea in the wake of the latest wave of missile launches.
The move is a signal from the Biden administration that it needs to bolster its military posture to ensure that the United States and its allies in the region such as South Korea and Japan are protected from North Korean missile tests.
The command said that it “ordered to intensify intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance activities in the Yellow Sea, as well as to enhance readiness among the ballistic missile defense forces in the region.”
Earlier this month, the US military conducted exercises in and around the Korean peninsula to demonstrate its readiness in the wake of North Korean activity, including simulating ballistic missile defense systems.
The US Army’s 35th Air Defense Brigade has moved to a remote location, “occupying its wartime defensive position, erecting a Patriot missile system and carrying out air and missile defense operations in a simulated combat scenario,” US Forces Korea said in a press release.
At sea, F-35 and F/A-18 fighter jets flew off the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln along with U.S. Air Force assets stationed in the region in a show of force in the Yellow Sea off the west coast of South Korea, according to a statement. Issued by the US Navy’s Seventh Fleet in Japan.
This story has been updated to clarify the location of the missile.
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