This was reported by military sources in Seoul. This is the fourth missile in a day after 23 short-range fires were fired yesterday to scare South Koreans
More missiles from North Korea.
Six, including one of the ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile) type, which could theoretically hit US territory.
The ultra-long-range bomb was programmed with a very vertical trajectory that would have shortened its flight time and travel length, and was aimed at the Sea of Japan.
The launch was detected at 7:40 a.m. local time in Italy from a location near the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. The Japanese defense has sounded the alarm in three prefectures, urging the population to take cover. But then he realized that the rocket did not fly over the archipelago’s airspace and landed earlier in the ocean. The South Korean military believes the ICBM malfunctioned in flight, causing the mission to fail.
On October 4, a medium-range ballistic missile exploded over Japan. In twenty-four hours, North Korea experienced 29 short-, medium-, and long-range missiles: more than the total in 2017, when Kim’s aggression prompted President Donald Trump to threaten “fire and anger” to “obliterate the regime and the rocketman.” . .
In September 2017, the North Koreans conducted their sixth nuclear test. Then, in 2018, a phase of dialogue between the Marshal, the South Koreans and the Americans began. After three Kim-Trump summits, negotiations in Hanoi collapsed in February 2019 and Pyongyang resumed its race to develop new devices to arm itself with nuclear warheads.
Washington is now underlining its “iron commitment” in defending its allies in Seoul and Tokyo. Major aerial maneuvers called “Vigilant Storm” are underway in South Korea, involving about 350 American and South Korean planes in “emergency takeout enemy commandos” simulations. A total of around 1,600 fighter bomb missions are planned: “The highest number in the history of joint exercises in South Korea,” said the US Air Force. “Vigilant Storm,” picked up on Monday, should have ended on Friday, November 4: it will continue in response to the North Korean fire, Seoul announced.
Why did Kim order 29 launches in 24 hours? “He’s trying to match his opponents’ air force performance, he wants to prove he’s capable of waging nuclear war. The sequence shows the intensity with which North Korea would use its nuclear missiles in the event of war,” Ankit Panda, a military expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, told NK News.
The scholar warns: “Without diplomatic openings from South Korea and the United States, this spiral can be expected to culminate in a veritable gun battle between the parties.”
Washington argues that the door to dialogue is always open, but Kim doesn’t respond. The Marshal vowed never to give up the nuclear arsenal built up despite international sanctions: “We will never give up at the price of another hundred-year embargo,” he said a few weeks ago.
On the American side, the negotiation is linked to the goal of complete denuclearization of North Korea. Pyongyang, on the other hand, wants to be recognized as a nuclear-capable state. Meanwhile, Kim leads a de facto nuclear power, analysts argue.
The only way to try an approach is “negotiations to control and reduce the northern arsenal in exchange for easing or lifting UN sanctions,” said Andrei Lankov, director of NK News. The problem, warns the Russian scholar, who also studied at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, is that the failure of the Trump administration’s attempt to strike a trade-off between international sanctions and the freeze on the north’s nuclear development program reduced room for negotiation. “In the United States, any deal with Pyongyang would meet with strong opposition because it would lead to the enemy’s recognition as a nuclear power.”
If such talks were resumed, “the opposition and the American press would accuse the White House of weakness and defeatism, surrendering to a petty Asian dictatorship” (near China and Russia, ed.). Lankov concludes with a bold suggestion: “It would take a little dishonesty to get the negotiations going again.” That is, the White House should “sell” to Congress and the press the attempt to contain Kim’s nuclear arsenal as the first step in a process toward full denuclearization.
November 3, 2022 (Change November 3, 2022 | 15:14)
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