[Tuesday’s missile was fired at only half-range, South Korea’s defense ministry said in a report to the National Assembly Thursday. The missile had a full range of 3,100 miles, the ministry said. Guam is 2,100 miles from Pyongyang.]
By
Anna Fifield
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Two U.S. nuclear-capable
strategic bombers conducted a joint operation with
South Korean air force
fighter jets on Aug. 31. (Reuters)
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TOKYO
— Armchair experts on North
Korea – and a fair few who watch from their desks too – like to write off Kim
Jong Un as unpredictable. Who knows what this nuclear-armed madman might do
next, the refrain goes.
U.S. warplanes conducted a bombing drill
Thursday close to the border that separates the two Koreas, as if to intimidate
the hard-to-read leader.
But anyone who’s surprised by the last
month’s events – from North Korea’s threat to fire missiles close to Guam, to
the actual launch of a missile over Japan – hasn’t been paying attention.
For Pyongyang’s actions have been clearly
telegraphed.
Take the Aug. 9 statement from the North’s
official Korean Central News Agency. The army’s top missile unit was drafting a
plan to create “an enveloping fire” around Guam with Hwasong-12 missiles, KCNA
reported. The plan would be sent to Kim, who would make a decision mid-month.
Sure enough, on Aug. 15, the agency reported
that Kim had been to see the missile unit’s leaders – he had a great time
there, if his broad smile in the photos is anything to go by – and had reviewed
the plan.
He was going to keep an eye on “the foolish
and stupid Yankees” a bit longer, KCNA quoted him as saying, making it clear he
was talking about the joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises starting on
Aug. 21.
North Korea always protests against the
exercises, which it views as a pretext for an invasion, and China and Russia
had been urging the United States to tone it down a bit. But they went ahead as
planned.
So what did Kim do? On Aug. 29, two days
before the end of the exercises, he fired a Hwasong-12 intermediate range
ballistic missile technically capable of reaching beyond Guam.
The United States responded by sending
stealth planes and fighter jets on a bombing drill near South Korea’s border
with North Korea Thursday, the final day of the exercises.
“You can go back years and find them pretty
clearly stating that this is what they’re going to do and this is why they're
going to do it,” said Van Jackson, an international security expert at Victoria
University in New Zealand. “And now it's just happening.”
In a statement after the launch, KCNA said
that the missile units were practicing “striking the bases of the U.S.
imperialist aggressor forces located in the Pacific operational theater” – an
apparent reference to Guam.
There have been clear signals before many of
North Korea’s recent provocations. Take its launch of an inter-continental
ballistic missile technically capable of reaching the mainland United
States.
In his New Year’s address on Jan. 1, Kim said
his rocket scientists were in the final stages of preparing for launch. On July
4, he made good on this.
“They show their hand when they’re going to
do something that could create actual instability,” Jackson said, citing
aircraft and maritime warnings head of missile launches over the years, and the
advance notification to Japan before it launched a rocket over its neighbor in
2009.
So, despite its often over-the-top language,
there’s plenty of reason to take North Korea seriously when it warns, as it did
this week, that there will be more missile launches.
Kim called Tuesday’s launch a “meaningful
prelude to containing Guam” and ordered his missile unit to be “fully ready to
go into action for decisive battle.”
North Korea is doing several things with
these launches, analysts said. One of them is practicing launching under a
variety of conditions and from a variety of places.
“This was an operational test,” said Vipin
Narang, an expert on nuclear proliferation and strategy at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, noting that this launch took place at a new site, just
north of the capital.
“They’re getting units ready to fire a
missile without being destroyed,” he said, adding that KCNA has emphasized that
this was a rehearsal for a real-life situation.
North Korea was also testing its technology.
Tuesday’s missile was fired at only
half-range, South Korea’s defense ministry said in a report to the National
Assembly Thursday. The missile had a full range of 3,100 miles, the ministry
said. Guam is 2,100 miles from Pyongyang.
But North Korea is also taking advantage of
the mayhem in Washington, said Robert Carlin, a retired U.S. intelligence
specialist on North Korea.
“The North Koreans read our media, they know
that Trump is in trouble and that Washington is dysfunctional,” Carlin
said.
“They know that, for all of the fist-shaking,
the United States really is a headless giant right now. They know that there’s
not much we can do, so they’re willing to press us,” he said.
The Trump administration has not reciprocated
with a clear message to the Kim regime, analysts say.
President Trump has vacillated between
calling Kim a “smart cookie” and warning him that the U.S. military is “locked
and loaded.”
Sanctions have been Washington’s main tool
for dealing with North Korea, but Pyongyang has found ways to get around any
new restrictions.
“Sanctions are always one step behind,”
Jackson said. “It’s a whack-a-mole problem.”
A forthcoming report from the U.N. panel of
experts on North Korea, seen by The Washington Post, says North Korea
“continues to flout the arms embargo and robust financial and sectoral
sanctions, showing that as the sanctions regime expands, so does the scope of
evasion.”
Military action against North Korea would
have “horrific” consequences, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said
earlier this month, not least because of the devastation that North Korea could
inflict on the South with its conventional artillery.
Even as his officials try to find an opening
for negotiations, Trump on Wednesday ruled out diplomacy. “Talking is not the
answer!” he tweeted.
But the president’s message was quickly
undercut by his own defense secretary.
“We are never out of diplomatic solutions,”
Jim Mattis said at the Pentagon before meeting his South Korean counterpart, as
if to back up Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s comment a few days earlier
that “the president speaks for himself.”
Narang of MIT said that the recent muddling
of messages goes beyond ambiguity. “Incoherence is not a strategy, and this is
really starting to look incoherent,” he said.
For that reason, North Korea is likely to
continue lobbing threats and firing missiles for the foreseeable future.
As Carlin, the former intelligence analyst
puts it: “Until the United States gives them a good reason to stop testing,
they’re not going to stop.”
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