National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said the U.S. and South Korea as the aggressors allows Kim to justify his weapons development,” Soo Kim said. “With nuclear weapons in tow and having mastered the art of coercion and bullying, Kim does not need ‘self-defense.’ But pitting the U.S. “There will always be fodder for (Kim Jong Un’s) weapons provocations.” and South Korea - however justified from the vantage point of defense and deterrence against (North Korea’s) reckless behavior - will be construed and protested as an act of hostility by North Korea,” said Soo Kim, a security analyst at the California-based RAND Corporation. “By now, we know that any action taken by the U.S. military drills as an invasion rehearsal though the allies say their exercises are defensive in nature. North Korea has steadfastly slammed regular South Korea-U.S. “I warn that we will watch every movement of the enemy and take corresponding and very powerful and overwhelming counteraction against its every move hostile to us,” she said. of “openly showing their dangerous greed and attempt to gain the military upper hand and predominant position in the Korean Peninsula.” In a statement Sunday, Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of Kim Jong Un, accused South Korea and the U.S. The North’s launch came a day after it vowed an “unprecedentedly” strong response over a series of military drills that Seoul and Washington plan in coming weeks. B-1B bombers, which are capable of carrying a huge payload of conventional weapons. North Korea is sensitive to the deployment of U.S. A South Korean military statement said Sunday’s training reaffirmed Washington’s “iron-clad” security commitment to South Korea. B-1B bombers and other aircraft separately trained with South Korean and Japanese fighter jets over and near the Korean Peninsula. Chang said the information provided by North Korea showed the missile will likely have a longer potential range than the standard Hwasong-15. “Kim Jong Un has 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 kind,” said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.Ĭhang Young-keun, a missile expert at Korea Aerospace University in South Korea, said that North Korea appeared to have launched an upgraded version of the Hwasong-15 ICBM. The North is pushing to build a solid-fueled ICBM, which would be more mobile and harder to detect before its launch. The Hwasong-15 is one of North Korea’s three existing ICBMs, all of which use liquid propellants that require pre-launch injections and cannot remain fueled for extended periods. The North says it has acquired such a technology. Whether North Korea has a functioning nuclear-tipped ICBM is still a source of outside debate, as some experts say the North hasn’t mastered a way to protect warheads from the severe conditions of atmospheric reentry. The Hwasong-15 launch demonstrated the North’s “powerful physical nuclear deterrent” and its efforts to “turn its capacity of fatal nuclear counterattack on the hostile forces” into an extremely strong one that cannot be countered, KCNA said. The flight details reported by North Korea, which roughly matched the launch information previously assessed by its neighbors, show the weapon is theoretically capable of reaching the mainland U.S. The steep-angle launch was apparently to avoid neighboring countries. It said the missile was fired at a high angle and reached a maximum altitude of about 5,770 kilometers (3,585 miles), flying a distance of about 990 kilometers (615 miles) for 67 minutes before accurately hitting a pre-set area in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. KCNA said the launch was designed to verify the weapon’s reliability and the combat readiness of the country’s nuclear force.
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