North Korea fired a volley of cruise missiles from its western coast, toward Yellow Sea, on Wednesday, the South Korean military said, in the latest example of fraying ties on the Korean Peninsula.
"Our military detected several cruise missiles launched by North Korea toward the Yellow Sea at around 7 a.m. today," South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, adding that details of the launches were “being closely analyzed by South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities.”
The missiles flew in a circular trajectory above waters west of the North Korean capital Pyongyang, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported, citing an unidentified source.
"The range was not short, and it was presumed to have been launched from the ground," the source said, speculating that the cruise missiles were likely type Hwasal-1 or Hwasal-2, which are capable of carrying the North's compact Hwasan-31 nuclear warhead.
Wednesday’s launches were believed to be the North’s first of cruise missiles since September, when it conducted what it said was a simulated "tactical nuclear attack" drill that included the launches of two long-range weapons carrying mock nuclear warheads into the Yellow Sea area.
The North has boasted that its most advanced long-range cruise missiles have flown up to 2,000 kilometers before hitting preset targets. Such a distance would put virtually all of Japan — including key U.S. military bases — within striking distance.
Experts say cruise missiles present a unique danger in that they can fly low and maneuver, making them potentially very difficult to intercept by air and missile defenses. Unlike ballistic weapons, North Korea’s cruise missiles are not banned under United Nations sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.
Pyongyang has ratcheted up tensions this month, firing off a solid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missile carrying a “hypersonic maneuverable controlled warhead” on Jan. 14 in its first missile test of the year. It followed this up on Friday with a claimed test of an "underwater nuclear weapon system."
But observers say North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s unusual shift in his rhetoric toward Seoul has been more unnerving than the spate of weapons tests.
Kim has in recent weeks declared South Korea his country’s “principal enemy,” abolished agencies focused on reunification and threatened to enshrine in the North’s constitution a goal of “completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming” its southern neighbor in the event of war.
He has also signaled that his regime no longer recognizes the two Koreas' de facto maritime border, the so-called Northern Limit Line, even staging days of live-fire artillery drills in the area that prompted the evacuation of residents of one nearby island earlier this month.
North Korea’s most recent move against the South before Wednesday's launches appears to have come earlier this month with the demolition of a large monument in Pyongyang symbolizing hope for unification, according to an analysis of satellite imagery published Wednesday by specialist website NK News.
The Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification, which Kim ordered removed earlier this month, did not appear in a Planet Labs medium-resolution satellite image taken Tuesday morning, the report said.
Though it was not clear exactly when it was taken down, the monument was last seen standing in an image taken Friday.
“We should also completely remove the eye-sore ‘Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification’ standing at the southern gateway to the capital city of Pyongyang and take other measures so as to completely eliminate such concepts as ‘reunification,’ ‘reconciliation’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our republic,” state-run media quoted Kim as saying on Jan. 15.
Colloquially known as the Arch of Reunification, the 30-meter-tall monument — which features two women, one from each Korea, holding up an emblem of a united Korean Peninsula — was completed in August 2001, at the height of Seoul’s so-called Sunshine Policy of engagement and economic cooperation.
Its removal is likely to draw comparisons to the North's decision to symbolically blow up a joint liaison office in the city of Kaesong, near the inter-Korean border, in June 2020.
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