Indeed, the missile that forced Japan on Thursday to activate shelter alerts for the population of the island of Hokkaido is a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), as some experts predicted yesterday. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un confirmed this and named it the Hwasong-18, a weapon that can theoretically reach the US and is much more efficient and difficult to detect compared to long-range missiles reach that Pyongyang had until now.
Kim oversaw the test and warned that knowledge of the weapon's existence in North Korea's hands would make enemies "experience a clearer security crisis, and constantly instill in them extreme anxiety and horror that they would take fatal countermeasures." and offensive until they abandoned senseless thinking and imprudent acts”.
To make the announcement, the North Korean leader was photographed with his daughter – whose age remains a mystery, although South Korean intelligence sources point to 10 – in several images taken at the launch site of the ballistic test. It was the third time that the girl accompanied her father in the launch of an ICBM.
The missile does not require the lengthy pre-launch propellant loading process required for liquid-fuel projectiles, which exposes them for longer to a possible pre-emptive enemy attack.
Storage, deployment and operation are easier and more effective with the Hwasong-18 compared to the ICBMs that Pyongyang has been revealing since 2017 (Hwasong-14, 15 and 17) and with which it could theoretically already cover the entire territory of the United States and almost the whole planet, with the exception of South America.
This new ICBM is an important step in increasing the variety and sophistication of an arsenal that makes it almost impossible to try to attack North Korean territory without offering retaliation from the regime of Kim Jong-un that costs many lives
Kim himself, who said that the weapon "will improve the country's nuclear counterattack capability", witnessed the launch yesterday in the company of, in addition to his daughter, his wife, his sister, members of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the unified party and some of the main figures of the national weapons program, the state news agency KCNA reported.
"The purpose of the test launch was to confirm the performance of high-propellant solid-fuel engines for multi-stage missiles and the reliability of the separation of the latter and various functional control systems, and to estimate the military use of this new strategic weapon," added KCNA, which released images of the correct separation of the three phases of the missile.
Developing a solid-fuel ICBM has long been seen as a key goal for North Korea, as it could help it deploy missiles more quickly during a war.
On Thursday, the South Korean military reported that it detected the launch of a medium- or long-range ballistic missile from the vicinity of Pyongyang and that the projectile traveled about 1,000 kilometers before falling into the waters of the Sea of Japan.
Japanese radars picked up the launch and estimated a trajectory that indicated a potential impact around the island of Hokkaido, prompting authorities to activate a public alert, although the missile disappeared from the screens and went end up falling in some undetermined point in the Sea of Japan, outside the exclusive economic zone of Japan. This would be explained by the fact that, as KCNA explains, the North Korean military set a standard ballistic trajectory for the first stage of the missile and a vertical one for the other two, which made the Hwasong -18 first draw a parabola and then go up the flight perpendicularly.
At the same time, it is striking that North Korea developed and tested a solid-fueled ICBM less than six years after testing its first equivalent liquid-fueled missile, an interval that was more than twice as long in of giants such as China (19 years) or India (13 years).
