Here are the details about North Korea’s latest missile launch over Japan:
A file photo of North Korea’s Hwasong-12 intermediate-range ballistic missile, which it test-launched on Aug. 29. [YONHAP]
North Korea has fired a ballistic missile over Japan, in the face of fresh sanctions against the isolated nation, according to the Japanese and South Korean governments. The missile was launched from the capital Pyongyang on Thursday just days after the U.S. announced additional sanctions against North Korea for carrying out a successful test of a hydrogen bomb capable of being fitted to an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Prior to that nuclear test, North Korea last month launched a missile over Japan in an act condemned by the United Nations at the time as “not just a threat to the region but all U.N. member states,” The New York Times reported.
According to a statement from the South Korean military Thursday, the missile is thought to have reached an altitude of 770km (478 miles) and travelled around 3,700km, with the Japanese government reporting the missile landed 1,240 miles east of Hokkaido. The chief cabinet secretary to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Yoshihide Suga, told The New York Times the country “absolutely cannot accept the repeated outrageous provocative actions by North Korea.” [Newsweek]
You can read more at the link, but what is significant about this launch is that the North Koreans have confirmed that they can range Guam:
The intermediate-range missile fired from Pyongyang at 6:57 a.m. on Friday flew over the northern island of Hokkaido, reaching an altitude of 770 kilometers (478 miles) before landing in the Pacific Ocean. It traveled 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) — further than the 3,400 kilometers (2,100 miles) from Pyongyang to Guam, which North Korea has repeatedly threatened.
“The range of this test was significant since North Korea demonstrated that it could reach Guam with this missile, although the payload the missile was carrying is not known,” David Wright, a co-director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post. [Bloomberg]
Here is the latest threat from North Korea in response to the recent United Nations sanctions. This type bombastic threat leads me to believe they may do yet another provocation. Since they are specifically mentioning Japan in this statement could they be setting conditions for another missile firing over the country? I guess we will see:
A North Korean state agency threatened on Thursday to use nuclear weapons to “sink” Japan and reduce the United States to “ashes and darkness” for supporting a U.N. Security Council resolution and sanctions over its latest nuclear test.
The Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, which handles the North’s external ties and propaganda, also called for the breakup of the Security Council, which it called “a tool of evil” made up of “money-bribed” countries that move at the order of the United States.
“The four islands of the archipelago should be sunken into the sea by the nuclear bomb of Juche. Japan is no longer needed to exist near us,” the committee said in a statement carried by the North’s official KCNA news agency.
Juche is the North’s ruling ideology that mixes Marxism and an extreme form of go-it-alone nationalism preached by state founder Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the current leader, Kim Jong Un. [Reuters]
I doubt Kim Jong-un is very concerned about this when he knows there is almost zero chance the ROK President is willing to execute such a preemptive strike. This report seems more for domestic consumption to show the ROK public the government is “doing something”:
South Korea’s defense minister is publicly boasting that it will create a new “decapitation unit” called the Spartan 3000 with the express intent of taking out North Korean leadership, The New York Times reports.
The brigade-sized unit of between 2,000 and 4,000 soldiers will be established by year’s end, The Times reported the defense minister, Song Young-moo, as saying, adding that the military was already “retooling” helicopters and transporting planes to be able to penetrate North Korean airspace at night.
It’s out of the ordinary for a senior government leader to publicly say they are working on a plan to assassinate a foreign head of state. But there’s an interesting reason behind it: The South is trying to freak out its northern neighbor and get it to the negotiating table instead of further developing nuclear weapons.
“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong Un fear for his life,” retired South Korean Lt. Gen. Shin Won-sik told The Times. [Business Insider]
As expected the United Nations sanctions in response to North Korea’s nuclear test have been watered down by the Russians and the Chinese. The cuts in oil imports and ban on textile exports will inconvenience the Kim regime, but I see nothing in these sanctions that will be a game changer in regards to changing the current status quo on the peninsula which is what the Chinese and Russians want to maintain:
Nikki Haley, left, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and Liu Jieyi, right, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, vote in favor of a Security Council resolution to impose fresh sanctions on North Korea over its latest nuclear test at the UN headquarters in New York on Monday. [XINHUA/YONHAP]The UN Security Council on Monday unanimously adopted new sanctions against North Korea following its sixth nuclear test, imposing a cap on exports of crude oil to the country, though it fell short of a complete ban.
The 15-member council based in New York approved Resolution 2375, which imposes a cap on the supply, sales or transfer of crude oil to North Korea to the level of the past 12 months, some 4 million barrels, and limits exports of refined petroleum products to the country to 2 million barrels a year. It also bans the sale of condensates and natural gas liquids to the North.
However, the latest resolution fell short of the complete oil embargo called for in an earlier U.S.-drafted resolution, which would have needed the support of veto-wielding members China and Russia.
The resolution, though considered a watered-down version of the U.S. draft, will reduce oil provided to North Korea by around 30 percent, according to the U.S. mission to the United Nations, and cut off over 55 percent of refined petroleum products going to the country. China is the largest supplier of crude oil to the North.
It also includes a ban on North Korean textile exports, which was the country’s second largest export category in 2016 after coal and other minerals, and is expected to reduce its revenues by up to $800 million.
The latest resolution does not include North Korean leader Kim Jong-un or his sister on its blacklist, as initially proposed. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
A ROK Drop favorite Andrei Lankov explains why Russia is going to attempt to water down United Nations sanctions on North Korea or veto them all together and it has nothing to do with Putin taking an anti-US position:
Andrei Lankov
Vladimir Putin was right when he recently said that even if North Koreans have to eat grass, they will not surrender nuclear weapons (of course, in North Korea the people who make decisions on nuclear weapons are far removed from the people who would have no choice but to eat grass).
However, there is the probability that a really harsh sanctions regime will eventually provoke a grave political crisis and revolution in North Korea: instead of eating grass, the people will rebel.
For American observers, who will watch enthusiastic TV reports about a North Korean revolution in safety, this development, as long as it does not trigger a region-wide war, will be welcome. After all, regime collapse will bring about the complete solution of the North Korean nuclear issue, the U.S.’s overwhelming concern.
However, Russia and China, inconveniently located on the border with North Korea, have reasons to be unenthusiastic about prospects of a Syria-like or Libya-like situation, anarchy and civil war in a nuclear-armed country nearby. For Moscow – and, for that matter, for Beijing – a collapsing North Korea is a greater threat than a nuclear one, however bad a nuclear North Korea is. [NK News]
You can read the rest of the analysis at the link.
I would not be surprised if this guy is a North Korean plant in South Korea to say propaganda like what is in this article or is being told to say these things for fear of harm to family members back in North Korea. It is like he is just repeating things straight from the Uriminzokkiri Twitter account:
Five years into his resettlement, the defector says the social environment is so different from the North that calls for unification no longer ring true for him.
“It’s better there is no unification,” he said. “If unification takes place now, only civil war and chaos would erupt,” as South Korea is not ready to deal with a flood of refugees coming to Seoul in the event of the Kim regime’s collapse.
He said discrimination is an obstacle and his fellow defectors struggle in menial jobs.
It is frosty indifference that is the greatest barrier to adjustment, he said, suggesting the real “nuclear” catastrophe on the peninsula has already happened with the nuclearization of Korean lives.
South Koreans “take no interest in your life,” he said. “There is not one person who wants to be your friend. In apartment buildings here, they do not even know who their next-door neighbors are.”
By contrast, in North Korean apartment communities, families “gather on the rooftop to play together, drink soju together and eat,” he said. “In South Korea you cannot have that kind of enjoyment. South Koreans only seek you out when they need you.”
He also criticized South Korea’s politics.
“South Korea has no ideology of its own,” he said.
“I came hoping to contribute to the healing of a divided country…but after living here I think it’s accurate to say South Koreans are [American] puppets,” he added, using the term commonly used to refer to South Korea in North Korea propaganda.
He also said South Koreans fear being at odds with the United States. “That’s why Americans don’t even regard [South] Koreans as human beings, or Asians in general,” he said. [UPI]
Here is what he had to say about defectors who have testified about human rights abuses:
“There’s too much focus on North Korea’s human rights abuses, too little on how it is a society constructed for the people,” he said, adding the defectors who expose human rights violations represent the worst of North Korean society.
“If you only bring together people who spent time in prison, all you get is the gutter,” he said, adding that many defector testimonies in United Nations Commission of Inquiry reports are “lies.”
