Another day and another North Korean provocation:
North Korea fired several rounds of short-range ballistic missiles toward the East Sea on Monday, the South Korean military said, three days after it launched cruise missiles into the Yellow Sea.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected what appeared to be several short-range ballistic missiles launched from the Pyongyang region at 3:01 p.m.
“The North Korean missiles flew about 300 kilometers and splashed into the sea,” the JCS said in a text message to reporters. It did not provide further details, citing an ongoing analysis.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
You can tell the Kim regime is trying to amp up the scary factor when they start calling things “super-large”:
North Korea conducted a “super-large warhead” power test for a strategic cruise missile and test-fired a new anti-aircraft missile this week, state media reported Saturday, further ratcheting up tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
The Missile Administration carried out the test of the warhead designed for the “Hwasal-1 Ra-3” strategic cruise missile, and test-launched its new anti-aircraft missile, the “Pyoljji-1-2,” in the Yellow Sea on Friday, KCNA said, noting that a “certain goal” was achieved through the test launch.
It is the first time that Pyongyang has named a missile “Pyoljji,” which means “meteor” in Korean.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The missile may have failed, but the test is only a failure if the engineers did not learn anything from it. As we have seen in the past, the North Koreans learn from their mistakes and have successfully built a number of capable missile systems:
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said Sunday that North Korea’s hypersonic missile launched earlier this month was “unsuccessful in its last glide flight” but predicted that the North’s hypersonic missile with an intermediate range could be “successful one day.”
Shin made the assessment during an interview with public broadcaster KBS after the North claimed it successfully test-fired the Hwasongpho-16B, a new intermediate-range ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
That is what some analysts believe:
Now in his 13th year running North Korea, Kim is more aggressively testing the boundaries of what his adversaries will tolerate. Backed by rapid progress in his nation’s nuclear capabilities and missile program, the 40-year-old dictator began 2024 by removing the goal of peaceful unification from North Korea’s constitution and declaring he had the right to “annihilate” South Korea.
While such bellicose rhetoric would normally be dismissed — Kim could just be posturing ahead of South Korean elections on April 10 — two prominent analysts set off a round of discussion among North Korea watchers with an article suggesting that this time Kim isn’t bluffing. “Like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” former CIA officer Robert Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker wrote in early 2024 on the website 38 North, which focuses on North Korea.
They didn’t forecast how soon that could take place. Carlin and Hecker’s views are not universal: Most analysts argue that any full-scale attack would be a move of desperation or suicide, inviting a response from South Korea and the US that would end the Kim family’s nearly eight-decade-long rule.
But with multiple conflicts raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, it’s just the kind of war the world could stumble into – with potentially devastating consequences for not just the Korean Peninsula, but the global economy and, particularly, the chip supply chain.
Stars & Stripes
I don’t agree that North Korea is plotting some sneak attack war on South Korea. Kim Jong-un cares about preserving his regime and a war would end it. I agree with Daniel Pinkston’s analysis of what North Korea’s strategy towards the ROK is:
Kim would’ve already invaded South Korea if he was actually preparing for war, according to Daniel Pinkston, an international relations lecturer at Troy University in Seoul and a former Korean linguist with the US Air Force. A simpler explanation, he said, is that North Korea is deterred from doing so. “The North Korea leadership is waiting for a restructuring of the world order and the collapse of the US-led alliance system in East Asia,” said Pinkston. “Unless that happens, I don’t see a theory of victory for North Korea.”
You can read more at the link.
I am actually surprised that more people haven’t done this over the Chinese North Korean border:
Rare photos and footage from inside North Korea taken by a civilian-operated drone launched from China gave a glimpse into the daily lives of people in the reclusive state.
A civilian with Reddit username XiaoHao2 shared 12 photos and three video clips of the northwestern border city of Sinuiju. The border city is located in the northwestern region of North Korea and faces the Chinese city of Dandong across the Yalu River, also known as the Amnok River.
The user titled the post, “Drone pics of North Korea, I was in China, my drone flew across the border,” adding that the photos and videos were captured using a Chinese-made DJI drone. The post was upvoted 14,100 times in three days.
The footage was recorded in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, according to the account holder that posted the images. A handful of images show North Korean residents looking up at the drone. A few seem startled by the drone crossing into North Korean airspace.
Korea Times
You can read more at the link.
