TOKYO – North Korea appears to have launched another intercontinental ballistic missile, the Pentagon said Tuesday, in the latest sign that Kim Jong Un’s regime is pressing ahead with its stated goal of being able to strike the United States mainland.
The missile traveled about 620 miles before landing off the coast of Japan early Wednesday local time, but its flight time of about 50 minutes suggested that it had been fired straight up – on a “lofted trajectory” similar to North Korea’s two previous ICBM tests.
“Initial assessment indicates that this missile was an intercontinental ballistic missile,” a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Robert Manning, said of the launch, which was the first from North Korea in more than two months.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted that President Donald Trump “was briefed, while missile was still in the air, on the situation in North Korea.”
Japan’s Defense Ministry said the missile landed in waters inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, off the coast of Aomori prefecture. Emergency alerts warned Japanese residents of the launch, and the coast guard told ships to watch for falling debris.
South Korea’s military conducted a “precision strike” missile launch in response, the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
It was the first North Korean missile launch in more than two months, but there had been signs that the North was making preparations. The Japanese government had detected radio signals suggesting that North Korea might be preparing for a ballistic missile launch, Kyodo News reported Monday, citing government sources.
Pyongyang has been working to fit a nuclear warhead to a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, a weapon it says it needs to protect itself from a “hostile” Washington. It has made rapid progress this year, firing two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, the second of which was technically capable of reaching as far as Denver or Chicago, or possibly even New York.
A senior South Korean official said Tuesday that North Korea could announce next year that it has completed its nuclear weapons program.
“North Korea has been developing its nuclear weapons at a faster-than-expected pace. We cannot rule out the possibility that North Korea could announce its completion of a nuclear force within one year,” Cho Myoung-gyon, the unification minister, who is in charge of the South’s relations with the North, told foreign reporters in Seoul.
Kim Jong Un opened 2017 with a New Year’s address announcing that North Korea had “entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of intercontinental ballistic missile.”
Then in July, his regime launched two ICBMs, the first on U.S. Independence Day. The second, on July 28, flew almost straight up for 45 minutes and reached a height of about 2,300 miles before crashing into the sea off Japan. But if it had been launched on a normal trajectory designed to maximize its range, it could have flown 6,500 miles, experts said.
Washington, D.C., is 6,850 miles from Pyongyang.
After its most recent missile launch, an intermediate-range missile that flew over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido on Sept. 15, North Korea said it was seeking military “equilibrium” with the United States as a way to stop American leaders from talking about military options for dealing with Pyongyang.
That was the second launch over Japan in less than three weeks and came less than two weeks after North Korea exploded what was widely believed to be a hydrogen bomb.
Those events triggered ire overseas, with Trump denouncing North Korea’s regime during a speech to the United Nations General Assembly and mocking Kim as “little rocket man.”
That label triggered an angry and unusually direct response from the North Korean leader, who called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and warned the U.S. president that he would “pay dearly” for his threat to destroy North Korea.
But despite an increase in tensions over the past two months, including a U.S. Navy three-carrier strike group conducting military exercises in the sea between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, 74 days had passed without any missile launches by the North.
That was the longest pause all year, according to Shea Cotton, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. North Korea has now tested 20 missiles this year, compared with 24 by this time last year.
The pause had raised hopes that North Korea might be showing interest in returning to talks about its nuclear program.
In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations late last month, Joseph Yun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, said that if North Korea went 60 days without testing a missile or a nuclear weapon, it could be a sign that Pyongyang was open to dialogue.
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