North Korea Likely Fired First Submarine Missile Since 2019
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said North Korea fired two ballistic missiles and no damage has been reported.
(Bloomberg) -- North Korea appears to have fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile for the first time in two years, adding to a series of tests demonstrating Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of nuclear-capable weapons that can evade U.S. interceptors.
The regime is suspected of launching an SLBM Tuesday from the eastern port of Sinpo into waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, South Korea’s military said. While authorities in Seoul didn’t say whether the missile was fired from a vessel or underwater platform, the Yonhap News Agency cited a person familiar with the matter as saying it might have been launched from a submarine.
While North Korea launched an SLBM from a submerged platform in October 2019, it hasn’t launched one from an actual boat since 2016.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida condemned the launch, noting that ballistic missile tests violated United Nations resolutions against North Korea’s weapons program. South Korea’s National Security Council expressed “strong regret” over the action while the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command urged North Korea to “refrain from any further destabilizing acts.”
The launch came as intelligence chiefs from the three allies met in Seoul to discuss how to advance stalled nuclear talks with North Korea, with South Korean President Moon Jae-in advocating greater engagement. On Thursday, South Korea is set to launch its new three-stage Nuri rocket, which was designed to put a satellite into orbit.
Kim has shown off an expanding range nuclear-capable weapons in recent days, including a series of submarine-based missiles and numerous other rockets displayed at a defense expo last week in Pyongyang. Such advances demonstrate for U.S. President Joe Biden the extent of Kim’s gains since vowing to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” during his landmark summit with former President Donald Trump in 2018.
North Korea issued no immediate statements on Tuesday’s launch and the few details provided by Japan and South Korea left weapons experts debating whether Kim had debuted a new weapon, fired a proven one or had a troubled test. The missile reached an altitude of about 60 kilometers (37 miles) and flew about 590 kilometers, Yonhap said, a much lower flight path than the 900-kilometer height reached during North Korea’s last SLBM test in October 2019.
“The trajectory indicates a short-range missile,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The missile could possibly be a small, solid-propellant SLBM North Korea unveiled at a defense expo last week, he added.
North Korean state media would be closely watched Wednesday to see whether the regime followed past practice and issued statements on, or photos of, the launch. Kim has in recent weeks rolled out what North Korea called a “hypersonic missile,” a nuclear-capable cruise missile and a new system to launch rockets from a train car.
The North Korean leader has shown particular focus in developing SLBMs, which would force the U.S. and its allies to consider the possibility of missile attack from different directions. Tuesday’s launch site was near a base where North Korea builds submarines and keeps a submerged platform used for past rocket tests.
The Pukguksong-3 launched by North Korea in October 2019 has an estimated range of at least 1,900 kilometers. Since then, North Korea has rolled out two new versions of the weapon -- the Pukguksong-4 and Pukguksong-5 -- in military parades. In addition to the Gorae, North Korea has been building a second, missile-capable submarine at Sinpo.
North Korea may have gone five years without launching a missile from an actual submarine because the sanctions-squeezed nation lacks a vessel large enough to accommodate its new, bigger missiles. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency said in a report earlier this month that Kim’s submarine program was “likely to grow slowly” because of the lengthy, resource-intensive manufacturing process of building more advanced boats.
Joseph Dempsey, a research associate for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the trajectory of Tuesday’s launch suggested the state might be making a pragmatic compromise to deploy missiles faster.
“It’s smaller size could allow more missile tubes to be mounted on a single submarine, but also could be easier to integrate on some existing designs,” Dempsey said. “If North Korea has indeed tested this smaller missile it will be interesting if they describe it as a ‘strategic’ system, typically used to describe their nuclear-capable system.”
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