N Korea celebrates missile test success
North Korea on Monday celebrated the launch of what appeared to be its longest-range ballistic missile yet tested in a bid to bring the US mainland within reach, saying it was capable of carrying a “heavy nuclear warhead”.
Leader Kim Jong Un personally oversaw the test on Sunday, the official Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) said, and pictures by state media showed him gazing at the missile in a hangar before the launch.
In others he gleefully clasped hands with officers and staff after the black missile — named as the Hwasong-12 — ascended into the sky.
The missile was launched on an unusually high trajectory, with KCNA saying it flew to an altitude of 2,111.5 km and travelled 787 km before coming down in the Sea of Japan.
That suggests a range of 4,500 km or more if flown for maximum distance, analysts said.
Aside from Pyongyang’s space launches, Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in the US told AFP: “This is the longest-range missile North Korea has ever tested.”
The North has carried out two atomic tests and dozens of missile launches since the beginning of last year in its quest to develop a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the continental US.
KCNA cited Kim as saying the North would never succumb to what it called the “highly ridiculous” US strategy of “militarily browbeating only weak countries and nations which have no nukes”.