North Korea yesterday fired what appeared to have been an intermediate range ballistic missile, but it crashed seconds after the test launch, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense said, the second such failure in the run-up to next week’s ruling party congress.
North Korea has conducted a flurry of missile launches, in violation of UN resolutions, and tests of military technology ahead of the Workers’ Party congress that begins on Saturday next week, and yesterday’s launch looks to have been hurried, according to a defense expert in Seoul.
A ministry official said that the launch at about 6:40am from near the east coast city of Wonsan appeared to have been of a Musudan missile with a range of more than 3,000km, adding that it crashed within seconds.
“They are in a rush to show anything that is successful, to meet the schedule of a political event, the party congress,” said Yang Uk, a senior research fellow at the Korea Defense and Security Forum and a policy adviser to the South Korean navy.
“They need to succeed but they keep failing. They didn’t have enough time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them because they were in hurry,” he said.
Yesterday’s apparent failure marks another setback for the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un. A similar missile launched on the April 15 birthday of his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, exploded in what the US Department of Defense called a “fiery, catastrophic” failure.
Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it had figured out what went wrong in the previous failed Musudan missile launch before attempting another, a process that could take months and a sign that yesterday’s firing was rushed.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency on Tuesday reported that the North appeared to be preparing the second launch of a Musudan. According to South Korea, the missile has never been successfully flight-tested.
The defense ministry official, who declined to be identified by name, said South Korean and US officials were analyzing the cause of the missile crash, declining to comment on why news of the launch was revealed several hours after it took place.
Yonhap said the fired missile was not detected by South Korean military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred meters, but was spotted by a US satellite.
The defense ministry said it could not confirm that report.
XI’S WARNING
In other developments, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) yesterday told a group of Asian foreign ministers in Beijing that his nation would not allow chaos and war to break out on the Korean Peninsula.
“As a close neighbor of the peninsula, we will absolutely not permit war or chaos on the peninsula. This situation would not benefit anyone,” Xi said in a speech to the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia.
The Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia involves 26 members, including Russia and many countries from central Asia and the Middle East. The US and Japan are among eight observers.
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