Kim gets ready to launch

NORTH KOREAN LEADER SHOWN NEXT TO ‘MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES’ Country steps up production of rocket engines, nose cones ‘to protect it from US’.

North Korea revealed plans for the development of its missile programme yesterday as leader Kim Jong-un ordered stepped-up production of rocket engines and intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) nose cones.

Under Kim, Pyongyang has made rapid strides in its ballistic missile technology, which it is banned from pursuing under United Nations resolutions that have slapped it with seven sets of sanctions.

Last month, it carried out two successful ICBM launches, overseen by Kim and apparently bringing most of its sworn enemy, the US, into range for the first time.

A series of threats followed from both sides and while the rhetoric has eased, the US and South Korea this week kicked off their annual military drills, which the North always condemns as dress rehearsals for invasion.

The North says it needs nuclear weapons to protect itself against the US. Analysts said pictures released yesterday of Kim’s visit to the Chemical Material Institute of the Academy of Defence Science revealed major technological advances and ambitions.

Kim was shown next to a large brown tube that Joshua Pollack of the US Middlebury Institute of International Studies said on Twitter was a “wound fibre cylinder, evidently a large-diameter solid-rocket motor casing in the making”. Other pictures included missile schematics and what appeared to be production processes.

“We have diagrams and names on two apparent new solid fuel multistage North Korean nuclear capable missiles,” one of them an ICBM and the other a medium- or intermediate-range device, said independent missile and nuclear analysts George Herbert.

Many of the elements on show were objectives, rather than current technology, analysts said but even so, Jeffrey Lewis of the armscontrolwonk.com website, said: “It’s all bad. If I understand North Korean propaganda, this is their way of telling us what we’ll see in the air in the coming year.”

Questions remain whether the North has mastered the technology needed to ensure a ballistic missile warhead survives the heat generated by re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere. – AFP