Pyongyang delivers ‘armed protest’ at military exercise
North Korea test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile yesterday that flew 500km towards Japan.
The successful launch, condemned by the Japanese prime minister as an ‘‘unforgivable, reckless act’’, confirmed that Pyongyang has greatly improved its missile technology.
The missile was fired off the east coast of North Korea at 5.30am local time and landed in waters inside Japan’s air defence identification zone.
Two submarine-launched ballistic missiles have exploded in midair this year after flying fewer than 30km. The range achieved by this launch means that much of South Korea now lies within striking distance.
‘‘I think it was probably successful,’’ Jeffrey Lewis, a security expert at Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said. ‘‘We don’t know the full range, but 500km is either full range or a full range on a lofted trajectory. Either way, that missile works.’’
North Korea has defied UN resolutions that prohibit it from any test of ballistic missile technology in carrying out several launches this year since its fourth nuclear test in January.
The country claims it has developed a nuclear warhead small enough to be put on a missile, and is working on a long-range missile capable of hitting the United States.
Officials in Seoul said the launch was an ‘‘armed protest’’ against the start of annual South Korean-US military drills. North Korea’s ambassador to the UN said on Tuesday that the exercises, which began the previous day with 75,000 troops from the two countries, were pushing the peninsula ‘‘to the brink of war’’.
Tensions had already worsened after the defection to the South last week of Thae Yong Ho, a senior diplomat at the North Korean embassy in London, and Seoul’s recent decision to deploy an advanced US missile defence system, which angered both Pyongyang and Beijing.
Yang Moo Jin, a Seoul-based expert on the North, told South Korea’s Yonhap news agency: ‘‘North Korea seems to be strengthening internal solidarity by shifting people’s attention to the Seoul-Washington military drill and away from Thae’s defection.’’
President Park of South Korea said that Thae’s defection suggested ‘‘serious cracks’’ in the isolated regime of Kim Jong Un, the third generation of the ruling Kim family.
The South’s foreign minister joined his counterparts from Japan and China in Tokyo yesterday in a planned trilateral meeting that is likely to have been dominated by their difficult neighbour.