NK missile fails after liftoff

Show of strength fizzles during festival

SEOUL: North Korea launched a ballistic missile yesterday from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff, according to US and South Korean military officials.

The timing was a deep embarrassment for the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, because the missile appeared to have been launched to show off his daring as a fleet of US warships approached his country to deter provocations.

Cmdr Dave Benham, a spokesman for the US Pacific Command, said the military had “detected and tracked what we assess was a North Korean missile launch at 11.21am, Hawaii time, April 15”.

The missile blew up almost immediately, and the type of missile involved was still being assessed, he said.

Over the past three years, a covert war over the missile programme has broken out between North Korea and the US. As the North’s skills grew, previous US president Barack Obama ordered a surge in strikes against the missile launches, including through electronic-warfare techniques.

It is unclear how successful the programme has been, because it is almost impossible to tell whether any individual launch failed because of sabotage, faulty engineering or bad luck. But the North’s launch-failure rate has been extraordinarily high since Mr Obama first accelerated the programme.

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said: “The president and his military team are aware of North Korea’s most recent unsuccessful missile launch. The president has no further comment.”

Vice-President Mike Pence, en route to South Korea, for the start of a 10-day trip through Asia, was briefed aboard Air Force Two on the failed missile launch.

Hours before the unsuccessful test, three types of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs) rolled through Pyongyang, the North’s capital, in an annual parade as the country tried to demonstrate that its military reach was expanding at a time of heightened tensions with the US.

During the parade, Mr Kim watched from a platform surrounded by elderly military officers as long columns of goosestepping soldiers marched through a large plaza, accompanied by tanks, missiles and rocket tubes.

Saturday was the 105th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the country’s founder, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather. Kim Il-sung’s birthday is the North’s most important holiday and a key moment for scoring propaganda points.

The US, China and other regional powers had feared North Korea might mark the occasion by conducting its sixth nuclear test or by launching an ICBM. Instead, Mr Kim seemed to have celebrated his grandfather’s birthday with a military parade meant to demonstrate his missile capabilities. He is acutely aware the threat that he could soon possess — a missile that could strike the continental US — is Washington’s biggest concern, and both the number and the variety of missiles he showed on Saturday seemed to be sending the message that a pre-emptive strike against his facilities would be fruitless.

To military analysts scrutinising North Korea’s broadcast of the parade, the most noteworthy element seemed to be three types of long-range ballistic missiles, one of them apparently new. While the North has repeatedly claimed that it can strike the US with a nuclear warhead, it has never flight-tested an ICBM capable of crossing the Pacific.

In addition, some analysts doubt that the country has mastered the skills to build a warhead that can survive reentry from space or one small enough to mount on a long-range missile. They said the ICBMs that had been displayed in recent North Korean military parades might have been mock-ups of systems still under development.

One missile showed off on Saturday was the KN-08, which the North first displayed in a 2012 parade and is widely believed to have been its first attempt at an ICBM.

Making their parade debut on launcher trucks with huge wheels were very large missiles encased in tubes or canisters. Analysts said the tubes appeared to have been designed for two other kinds of long-range ballistic missiles. There were multiple examples of each tube; it was impossible to see what was in them, but analysts said it was likely that they contained missiles that were either completed or under development.

Militaries use such canisters to “cold launch” missiles, ejecting them high into the air before their fuel ignites. If North Korea perfected that technology, it would help the nation better protect its mobile missiles from environmental damage while being driven around and from fiery exhaust during launch. The method can also make missiles harder to detect once fired.

“They’re not just showing off missiles that are hard to build,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California. “They’re showing off all the associated technologies you need for credible deployments.”

Kim Dong-yub, a missile expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, said one kind of tube appeared to be for the KN-14, a modified version of the KN-08 that was first displayed in a parade in 2015, during which the North claimed that its missiles were tipped with nuclear warheads.

The other tube design was new to the analysts. “Given the size, it looks like it contains a new ballistic missile with a range of at least 6,000km,” making it potentially an intercontinental threat, said Shin In-kyun, a military expert who runs the Korea Defence Network.

“Officials in the region will scramble to figure out whether this is a new solid-fuel, long-range ballistic missile the North was believed to be developing.”

Almost all of the North’s other ballistic missiles use liquid fuel, which can take hours to load from tanker trucks. Solidfuel missiles carry their own combustible supplies, making them easier to transport and fire. North Korean missiles using the method could be kept on submarines or mobile launch pads, hidden in the country’s elaborate tunnel system and launched on short notice.

The Pukguksong-2, an intermediaterange ballistic missile the North tested in February, uses solid-fuel technology. That missile was displayed in a parade for the first time on Saturday. So were the Pukguksong-1 — the North’s first submarinelaunched ballistic missile — and the ScudER, designed to reach US military bases in South Korea and Japan.