North Korea tests most powerful missile

 

    

BY OYEKAN OLUWATOBI

North Korea on Sunday tested its most powerful missile ramping up the firepower for its record-breaking seventh launch this month as Seoul warned nuclear and long-range tests could be next. 

Pyongyang has never test-fired this many missiles in a calendar month before and last week threatened to abandon a nearly five-year-long self-imposed moratorium on testing long-range and nuclear weapons.

With peace talks with the US stalled, North Korea has doubled-down on leader Kim Jong Un’s vow to modernize the regime’s armed forces, flexing Pyongyang’s military muscles despite biting international sanctions.

South Korea said that North Korea appeared to be following a “similar pattern” to 2017 when tensions were last at breaking-point on the peninsula warning Pyongyang could soon restart nuclear and intercontinental missile tests.

North Korea “has come close to destroying the moratorium declaration”, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in said in a statement following an emergency meeting of Seoul’s National Security Council.

South Korea’s military said it had detected an intermediate-range ballistic missile fired at a lofted angle eastward towards the East Sea.

The ballistic missile was estimated to have hit a maximum altitude of 2,000 kilometers and flown around 800 kilometers for half an hour, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

That indicated that Pyongyang may have tested its “first Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) since 2017”, Joseph Dempsey, an analyst with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote on Twitter.

The last time Pyongyang tested a similar missile was in 2017, when the Hwasong-12 flew 787 kilometers at an apogee of just over 2,111 kilometers.

Analysts said at the time that the trajectory indicated that the missile could have flown around 4,500 km if fired on a range-maximizing ballistic trajectory — putting the US territory of Guam in range.