North Korea says it tested new missile

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA » North Korea said Sunday that the two projectiles it fired a day earlier were a new type of missile, making this the third new shortrange ballistic missile or rocket system the North has successfully tested in less than a month as Washington struggles to resume talks on denuclearization.

The two missiles were launched off North Korea’s east coast Saturday in its second weapons test in the past week. On Sunday, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency released photographs of Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, watching what it called the launching of “another new weapon system.”

After scrutinizing the photos, outside analysts said the missiles, fired from a tracked mobile launcher with two missile tubes, were of a type unveiled for the first time.

North Korea has conducted five weapons tests since July 25, all of them in violation of U.N. resolutions, according to South Korea. They include a new short-range ballistic missile, known as KN23 among outside analysts, which they said resembled Russia’s Iskander missile in its flight pattern and other traits. The North also tested a new multiple-tube rocket launcher.

The test Saturday “looks like a new short-range ballistic missile,” likely with a purpose similar to that of the KN-23, said Michael Duitsman, a research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California. “I am not sure why North Korea would need two different missiles for the same role.”

But the unveiling and testing of a new missile leaves little doubt that despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that his on-again, off-again diplomacy with Kim is making progress toward denuclearization, North Korea has continued to modernize and expand its missile capabilities.

“North Korea had not one but two short range ballistic missile under development this year,” Melissa Hanham, a missile expert at One Earth Future Foundation, said on Twitter. “This is not denuclearizing, this is not even close.”

Trump has shrugged off North Korea’s recent weapons tests, calling them “smaller ones” that involved neither nuclear explosions nor intercontinental ballistic missiles. But the North’s short-range missiles present a potent threat to South Korea and Japan, both key allies of the United States, as well as to the U.S. troops and civilians in both countries.

The president’s attitude has essentially given North Korea a free hand in developing and testing its shortrange weapons, analysts said. On Saturday, Trump said Kim had sent him a letter with a “small apology” explaining that North Korea was conducting tests to counter a U.S. military exercise with South Korea that Trump has criticized as too expensive.

On Sunday, North Korea invoked Trump’s comments to argue that the South had no business complaining about its recent weapons tests.

“With regard to our test for developing the conventional weapons, even the U.S. president made a remark which in effect recognizes the self-defensive rights of a sovereign state, saying that it is a small missile test which a lot of countries do,” Kwon Jong Gun, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official, said in a statement carried Sunday by the North Korean news agency.