North Korea on Thursday said for the first time that it successfully tested a new multiple-warhead missile capability, state-run media said, a claim dismissed by the South Korean military as a “deception.”
Pyongyang “successfully conducted the separation and guidance control test of individual mobile warheads” on Wednesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported, adding that “the separated mobile warheads were guided correctly” to three target coordinates.
The effectiveness of a decoy that separated from the missile was also verified by anti-air radar, it added.
“The test is aimed at securing the MIRV capability,” KCNA said, referring to multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles. The launch, it added, was carried out using “the first-stage engine of an intermediate-range solid-fuel ballistic missile within a 170~200 km radius,” a move it said helped ensure safety and the ability to measure “the flight characteristics of individual mobile warheads.”
Pyongyang hailed the MIRV capability as one of “great significance in bolstering up (North Korea’s) missile forces and developing the missile technologies,” KCNA said.
Testing, it added, had now “entered a full-scale stage.”
South Korea’s military, however, disputed this claim, reiterating its analysis that the test was of a solid-fueled hypersonic missile that exploded in midair.
"North Korea's missile launched yesterday exploded in an early stage of the flight," the Yonhap news agency quoted South Korean military spokesman Col. Lee Sung-jun as saying. "North Korea made a different announcement this morning but (we) believe that this is merely a method of deception and exaggeration."
Seoul said that the U.S. had also assessed the launch as a failure, and that photos accompanying the KCNA report appeared similar to those of a March 2023 Hwasong-17 liquid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile launch.
"North Korea failed in its last space rocket launch and failed again (Wednesday), and (we) believe that there is a motive to cover these up," Lee said, referring to Pyongyang’s attempt to put a military spy satellite into orbit late last month. That attempt ended in a fireball after the rocket exploded shortly after takeoff.
In Tokyo, the Japanese government’s top spokesman refused to comment on whether it believed the launch to have been successful, but said more “provocations” were likely to come.
“North Korea has consistently shown its will to strengthen its nuclear and missile capabilities, and we believe that there is a possibility that it will continue to engage in further provocations,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi told a news conference Thursday.
There is also “clear evidence” that North Korea wants MIRVs, said Malcolm Davis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank in Canberra.
An MIRV capability would potentially allow for a single missile to drop nuclear warheads on a broad swath of targets, complicating missile defense efforts, he said. Anti-ballistic missile defense systems in the United States, as well as in South Korea and Japan, rely on a limited number of expensive interceptors — which all have just one warhead.
Ankit Panda, a nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the capability was mainly “aimed at ensuring that North Korea can keep ahead of U.S. homeland missile defense efforts to maintain an assured capability to deliver nuclear warheads against the continental United States.”
North Korea has long been known to be seeking an MIRV capability, but this was the first time it had publicly announced such a test. At a ruling party congress in January 2021, North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un laid out — in unusually specific detail — a weapons development wish list, including “perfecting the guidance technology for (a) multiwarhead rocket.”
Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have soared in recent weeks, with Seoul completely suspending the 2018 inter-Korean tension-reducing military pact with Pyongyang earlier this month and Kim inking a landmark treaty with Russian President Vladimir Putin — a pact that includes a mutual defense pledge.
These tensions are unlikely to abate in the near term as the two sides trade barbs and ramp up military moves.
On Thursday, South Korea, Japan and the U.S. conducted the first iteration of their multidomain Freedom Edge joint exercises, which are scheduled to run through Saturday, the Japanese Defense Ministry’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.
The large-scale joint military drills involve navy destroyers and fighter jets, as well as the Maritime Self-Defense Force’s Ise helicopter carrier and the nuclear-powered USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier.
The exercises were focused on improving interoperability and boosting defenses against missiles, submarines and air attacks. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said the Freedom Edge exercises would “continue to expand” in the future.
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