North Korea says intermediate missile’s range bests Tokyo and Seoul estimates

North Korea claimed Sunday that a military drill involving an “intermediate-range strategic missile” saw the weapon fly 1,000 kilometers — around 300 km further than estimates by Tokyo and Seoul.

The exercise, overseen by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, was conducted as part of efforts to train soldiers operating the “hypersonic strategic weapon system” and “evaluate the reliability, efficiency and mobility of the DPRK’s war deterrent,” the country’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.

DPRK is the acronym for the North’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

KCNA quoted Kim as saying that the North “must continue our responsible efforts nonstop to constantly and repeatedly make the enemy recognize the reliability and fatality of our strategic offensive means.”

“This is indispensable for protecting national security and stability in today’s geopolitical environment,” Kim added. “There will be no change in such view and line of ours.”

On Saturday, the Defense Ministry in Tokyo said it had detected the launch of a missile from North Korea’s eastern coast that flew for an estimated 680 km, hitting a maximum altitude of 90 km.

The missile had landed in waters off the Sea of Japan, outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which extends 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from its shores, according to the ministry.

South Korea’s military also confirmed the North had fired a ballistic missile, with the weapon traveling an estimated 700 km.

However, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of the North Korean leader, claimed that both Tokyo and Seoul had failed to accurately track the artificial intelligence-assisted missile’s flight path, disparaging the estimated travel times released by Japan and South Korea as “interesting numbers.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, accompanied by his daughter Ju Ae, oversees the firing of an intermediate-range missile from the eastern region of the country during a military drill on Saturday. | KCNA / via REUTERS

She said that the North Korean military had “already witnessed similar announcements four times,” reaching a conclusion that “the superiority of the special flight mode applied to the missiles in our possession has been verified in practice.”

“Of course, we should neither believe the enemy’s tracking results nor satisfy ourselves of them, but such figures help take a look at the limitations of the enemy’s tracking capability and the special features of our missiles,” she said.

“Whenever we applied the wave-like trajectory mode to missiles, the enemy failed to track the targets from their first skip points,” Kim Yo Jong added

“In other words, this means that there is no way to avoid this attack,” she said.

The nuclear-armed North has worked to develop ballistic missiles that can perform “pull-up” maneuvers, allowing them to fly on irregular paths rather than typical ballistic trajectories. The development has complicated Japanese efforts to intercept and even track these weapons.

Japan operates a nationwide automatic warning and control system to defend against ballistic missile threats. But while radar can immediately calculate the parabolic flight paths of conventional ballistic missiles based on launch angle and speed, the new missiles are equipped with new capabilities.

They can evade detection by sharply deviating from projected flight paths or by flying at low altitudes that — due to the curvature of the Earth — render some parts of the Korean Peninsula invisible to Japan-based radar systems.