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North Korea has said it successfully fired a solid-fuel “hypersonic” missile for the first time, demonstrating Pyongyang’s increasingly sophisticated missile capabilities as the regime deepens defence co-operation with Russia.
The intermediate-range ballistic missile was launched from a site near Pyongyang on Sunday afternoon and flew eastward on a lofted trajectory for less than 12 minutes before splashing down in waters between North Korea and Japan, according to the South Korean and Japanese militaries.
If successful, Sunday’s launch would have been the first time Pyongyang combined two recent milestones in its weapons development programme — solid-fuel missiles and missiles with a “manoeuvring re-entry vehicle”.
North Korea claims to have successfully tested solid-fuel and manoeuvrable missiles in separate launches in the past.
Solid-fuel missiles can be fuelled in secret before they are deployed, giving adversaries less time to conduct a preventive strike. The trajectories of manoeuvrable missiles, sometimes known as hypersonic missiles, can be changed mid-flight with fins or winglets, making them more accurate and harder for defence systems to intercept.
Experts said North Korean IRBMs were probably capable of striking US assets in Asia, including military installations in Guam and the western Pacific.
According to North Korea’s state Korean Central News Agency, the “intermediate-range hypersonic manoeuvrable controlled warhead” test on Sunday focused on its “gliding and manoeuvring characteristics” and the “reliability of newly developed multi-stage high-thrust solid-fuel engines”.
Ankit Panda, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said an image published by the KCNA on Monday suggested the IRBM featured a re-entry vehicle capable of conducting “terminal-stage manoeuvres”.
He added that battlefield debris in Ukraine suggested Russia had used a North Korean KN-23 short-range ballistic missile in an attack on the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv this month. Such weapons can “conduct manoeuvres at hypersonic speeds throughout its flight”, foiling air defence systems.
Last week, the US government imposed sanctions on a Russian citizen and three companies allegedly involved in the transfer and testing of North Korean ballistic missiles, after the White House accused Russia of deploying North Korean short-range ballistic missiles in attacks on several Ukrainian cities between December 30 and January 6.
Russia has dismissed the accusations, with the country’s UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accusing the US of “spreading information that is wrong, without going through the trouble of checking it beforehand” during a meeting of the UN Security Council last week.
North Korean foreign minister Choe Son Hui arrived in Moscow on Sunday for a three-day trip amid speculation that the countries were preparing for Russian President Vladimir Putin to pay a reciprocal visit to Pyongyang after Kim Jong Un travelled to Russia’s Far East in September.
Panda said Kim’s regime was unlikely to pay a substantive diplomatic price over its burgeoning weapons trade with Russia.
“Russia’s willingness to treat Pyongyang largely as a normal partner substantially lowers the coercive leverage that South Korea, the United States and other like-minded states possess in shaping North Korean behaviour,” he said.
