On Friday morning, North Korea launched another missile from it’s facility near Pyongyang. Reports are that, as with North Korea’s most recent previous launch, this missile crossed over a portion of Japan before splashing down in the Pacific.
The missile is likely to have reached an altitude of about 770km (478 miles) and travelled some 3,700km, South Korea's military said.
South Korea and the US are analyzing the details of the launch, it added.
The high altitude suggests that this could be a different missile system that the one North Korea launched across Japan in late August. The missile in the Friday morning test passed over Hokkaido, northern Japan, meaning that it followed a similar path to the August flight. However, it flew higher and further than that launch.
In between these two launches, North Korea conducted its largest test of nuclear device. Though North Korean state news has indicated that the explosion was generated by a fusion bomb, and images have been released suggested that the North Korean military has reached the point of being able to miniaturize a device to the point where it can be fitted to a missile, many experts doubt aspects of that claim.
The device North Korea exploded may have actually been a “boosted” or high-yield fission device. It may also have been a large device, such as the one used in the first US test of a fusion explosion in 1952. Such devices are difficult to scale to something that can be launched on a missile.
As a result of both the missile launches and the nuclear test, the United States has pressed for stiff sanctions against North Korea. Meanwhile, North Korea has suggested that it will “gift” the United States with additional nuclear tests.
Vox reported on Thursday that state media in North Korea relayed a number of threats that, even for North Korea, are disturbing.
“Let's reduce the US mainland into ashes and darkness,” said a spokesperson for the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, which oversees North Korea’s foreign affairs and propaganda, as reported by the state-run Korean Central News Agency. He even said the US should “be beaten to death as a stick is fit for a rabid dog.”
In August, following both a series of tests and an escalating exchange of threats that saw the United States overfly South Korea and move additional warships into the region, Donald Trump warned:
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters in remarks aired on television and broadcast around the globe. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.
Multiple sources have urged Trump to make a preemptive strike against North Korea, but the immediate threat from conventional weapons in the DMZ, only thirty miles north of South Korea’s largest population center, makes it problematic to make any strike against the Korean regime.
Analysis from many experts suggests that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants nuclear weapons capability so that North Korea doesn’t end up like Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria; states where the US strikes with impunity. However, the existence of nuclear weapons in North Korea has generated an escalating series of crisis that risk toppling into war if either side believes the other is about to move first.