North Korea fired more missiles in 24 hours on Wednesday than in all of 2017, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump exchanged nuclear threats, including the latest North Korean nuclear test. Pyongyang launched 23 projectiles yesterday, the highest number recorded in a single day. A provocation that continued this Thursday with the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile bound for Japan, which crashed due to (supposedly) a technical failure, although fears had already spread among residents of parts of the island who went to seek refuge.
What has driven Kim to make record throws? Analysts point to a retaliation for the military exercises in Seoul and Washington, but why are you so concerned about these exercises in particular? Are there other reasons that explain the escalation? Here are the answers:
South Korea and Washington have been conducting the largest air exercises in their history in the region since Monday. As part of the maneuvers, dubbed "Storm Vigilante," 240 US and South Korean planes will have flown 1,600 times by Friday simulating 24-hour attacks. These are F-35A and F-35B fighter jets, designed to be difficult to detect by enemy radar or infrared sensors.
While North Korea has nuclear weapons, unlike its neighbor to the south, its air force is its Achilles' heel, experts say. It is noticeably behind in terms of fighter technology. "Most of North Korea's planes are obsolete (...) It has very few state-of-the-art combat planes," Cheong Seong Chang, a researcher at the Sejong Institute, told France Presse. "The North doesn't have enough jet fuel," so they can't spend it on training, he adds.
North Korea has always seen the moves by Seoul and Washington as dress rehearsals for a future invasion of its territory or the overthrow of its regime. An idea fed by reports that circulated last summer that both allies were training "decapitation attacks" with the aim of eliminating the main North Korean leaders during a lightning military operation. Pyongyang fears that the advanced fifth-generation F-35 fighter could be used for this purpose, argues the Asan Institute researcher
The reactive escalation of maneuvers that Pyongyang considers "aggressive and provocative" adds to months of frenetic activity: with the largest number of missile launches (more than 60) in a year, including some that were intended to make history, such as the new " hypersonic missile" in January. For some analysts, the sequence of events indicates that Kim Jong Un is preparing the ground to carry out a nuclear test, which would be the seventh in his history and the first in five years.
Pyongyang's 23-missile launches were not a "usual response to allied exercises. Rather, they were designed to heighten tensions. If North Korea prefers to conduct a nuclear test in the midst of a crisis, it is very close to doing so." provoke one," says the director of the Defense Posture Project of the Federation of American Scientists, Adam Mount, on his Twitter.
Currently, North Korea has completed all technical preparations for a nuclear test, the first since 2017, according to South Korean and US officials.
Kim Jong Un needs to keep perfecting his missiles and testing them endlessly. Under the pretext of escalation, North Korea is testing its technology that, apparently, this Thursday has failed. The Japanese government lost the signal of the missile aimed at penetrating the island's airspace, in a launch that was reminiscent of the one on October 4, which represented the longest range test (about 4,600 km) of a North Korean intermediate-range missile that flew over Japan into the Pacific Ocean.
Retired Vice Admiral and former Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force fleet commander Yoji Koda says the loss of radar tracking on the projectile pointed to a failed launch. "It means that somewhere along the flight path there was a problem with the missile and it actually broke down," he told Yonhap news agency.
