Summary:
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The Hwasong-17 can theoretically go from North Korea to the United States.
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It sees these drills as a prelude to war.
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North Korea fired off the most cruise and ballistic missiles in 2022 to add to its arsenal and respond to the drills.
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The addition of the canister launcher shows that the country is trying to build a land-based, solid-fuel ICBM, even though the designs may change slightly from the parade to the launch.
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The National Security Council did not answer a request for comment on the Biden administration’s plan.
The Hwasong-17 can theoretically go from North Korea to the United States. However, Pyongyang has yet to show that the warhead can reach a target at such a distance or that it will survive reentry.
No matter what happens, Kim Jong Un and North Korea are sending a clear message: The United States can’t stop us, no matter how hard they try. It’s a bold move that shows how far the country’s military has come and how hard the West has tried and failed to get the Kim family to give up its weapons.
It rips a hole in the more than 20-year-old American homeland missile defense strategy based on protecting against a “limited” missile threat from North Korea. Ankit Panda, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Kim Jong Un and the Bomb,” stated that this threat is no longer limited and that the United States cannot rely on missile defence to confer anything close to invulnerability to North Korean retaliation in a conflict.
It wouldn’t take as many North Korean missiles to get past the ground-based midcourse defence system, or GMD, according to its detractors. It may just require one.
James Acton, who co-directs Carnegie’s nuclear policy department, described the experiment as “utterly ridiculous.” He said this is a problem because the sun makes it easier to keep an eye on the bomb-carrying reentry vehicle. GMD has only ever been tried at night once, and it failed. It’s why experts think a foe would fire an ICBM at night.
President Joe Biden has tried to avoid direct talks with North Korea, but this isn’t always on purpose. North Korea has not yet responded to the administration’s offer to meet anywhere, at any time, and without restrictions. The objective is to get Pyongyang to discuss any problems in the relationship, but so far, all attempts have been met with resistance.
North Korea is furious that the U.S. has gotten closer to Japan and South Korea during this time. North Korea has often made it clear that it doesn’t like that joint military drills between the US and South Korea are still going on and getting bigger. It sees these drills as a prelude to war. North Korea fired off the most cruise and ballistic missiles in 2022 to add to its arsenal and respond to the drills.
South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol said that his country might make nuclear weapons because of this historic pace.
In January, he said it was “likely” that if the situation worsened, “our country might introduce tactical nuclear weapons or make them on our own.” “If that’s the case, given our scientific and technological skills, we can have our nuclear weapons relatively rapidly.”
The issue might only worsen. As part of its endeavour to create land-based, solid-fuel ICBMs, North Korea also displayed several vehicles carrying missile canisters. Because those weapons are practically preloaded, they don’t need to be fueled up before launch, reducing the time Pyongyang has to hurry them out for launch before an enemy fires them on the ground.
Analysts, however, were unable to view the actual object. According to them, the canister on the nine-wheel chassis is probably a mockup. This year’s version is more significant than previous ones, which shows that North Korea is getting closer and closer to its goal of having a solid-fuel ICBM that can be used.
According to David Schmerler, a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, “North Korea typically displays systems it aims to produce.” The addition of the canister launcher shows that the country is trying to build a land-based, solid-fuel ICBM, even though the designs may change slightly from the parade to the launch.
When asked about the plans of the Biden administration, the National Security Council did not respond immediately. But the policy result is clear: North Korea is now marching in front of the whole world because no government has been able to stop it from getting to this point.
Whether we like it or not, North Korea represents the United States’ third nuclear deterrence relationship that will need to be addressed in much the same way we would plan to address Russia and China, according to Carnegie’s Panda.
