(CNN Spanish) — North Korea has launched 23 ballistic missiles so far in 2022 – the most in a year since Kim Jong Un took power – but only one of them flew over the territory of Japan, marking a considerable escalation in its weapons testing program. These may be the reasons for his decision.
ambition sign
Pyongyang routinely fires its missiles into the waters off the coast of the Korean peninsula, making the flight over Japan, the first since 2017, considerably more provocative. And this occurs both for practical reasons —the possibility of impacting the civilian population, for example—, as well as symbolic.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at CNS, called it an escalation because “it’s provocative to fire a missile at your neighbor.” “Especially to the Japanese, it feels like a violation of their sovereignty,” Lewis said.
According to experts, it is a sign of Kim’s ambitions for North Korea’s weapons development and of what is to come.
practical reasons
North Korea’s reasons for launching the missile over Japan may be practical, according to Joseph Dempsey, a defense and military analysis researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Normally, Pyongyang tests longer-range missiles on a high trajectory and these fall west of Japan. These altitude tests, however, “do not present a realistic flight profile” so that “some doubt may remain about the reliability of the missile if it ever had to be used operationally, in particular its ability to withstand the different forces that are exert on it and also its relative accuracy at longer ranges,” Dempsey said.
In other words, doing the flight path it did allows North Korea to measure its accuracy and endurance better than the usual tests.
exploit instability
Robert Ward, senior fellow for Japanese Security Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that “North Korea may be trying to exploit the unstable international situation, which it could see as a tailwind.” multiple security threats already facing Japan, from an aggressive Russia to the north and China to the south.
Lewis disagreed, saying that while North Korea sometimes responds or retaliates for specific actions by Western actors or groups, for the most part “they have their own timetable.”
The anti-Japanese rhetoric of 2017
The last time North Korea launched a missile over Japan was in 2017 on the island of Hokkaido.
That launch came after North Korea’s state news agency KCNA said the “four islands of the (Japanese) archipelago should be sunk into the sea by the Juche nuclear bomb,” referring to the ruling ideology of North Korea.
A message for the United States?
When North Korea made that launchwas also interpreted as an attempt to send a message to the United States, since at the time it traveled a distance equivalent to that of the country and Guam, a US territory that Pyongyang had threatened.
In this case, the distance traveled by the missile until it fell into the Pacific Ocean, according to reports, was even greater than that between North Korea and Guam: it covered about 4,600 km, while between the two territories there are 3,380 km.
On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reaffirmed the alliance between Tokyo and Washington to promote the complete denuclearization of North Korea in line with UN Security Council resolutions and pledged to strengthen cooperation with the United States. and South Korea.
With information from Yoonjung Seo, Brad Lendon, Junko Ogura and Emiko Jozuka in Tokyo.