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North Korea Fires Short-Range Missiles, Its 2nd Test in Less Than a Week

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast on Wednesday, the South Korean military said, the North’s second weapons test in less than a week.

The missiles were launched from near Wonsan, a coastal town east of Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, the South Korean military said in a brief statement. They flew 155 miles to the northeast, reaching a height of 18 miles, before splashing into the sea, it said.

South Korean officials declined to offer further details, pending analysis of flight and other data together with their United States allies.

“North Korea’s recent series of missile tests does not help efforts to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula and we urge the North to stop this type of act,” the South Korean military said.

North Korea launched two short-range missiles from near Wonsan last Thursday. Those missiles flew 267 miles and 430 miles, before landing in waters between North Korea and Japan. North Korea called them a “new-type tactical guided weapon” that it said would be hard to intercept because it could glide at a low altitude and could be maneuvered during its flight. But South Korean officials later identified them as a new type of short-range ballistic missile, similar to Russia’s Iskander ballistic missile.

That was the first time South Korea had formally accused the North of testing a ballistic missile since November 2017, when the North launched the Hwasong-15, an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland United States. United Nations resolutions forbid North Korea to launch ballistic missiles of any kind.

Japan said the North Korean projectiles launched Wednesday had not landed in its territorial waters, indicating that they were short-range weapons.

North Korea’s resumption of weapons testing has come amid stalled efforts to resume talks with the United States on ending its nuclear weapons program.

President Trump met with the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, in the Demilitarized Zone on June 30, and both leaders agreed to resume staff-level dialogue between their governments. But such talks have yet to take place.

North Korea has recently indicated that if the United States and South Korea did not cancel a joint military exercise planned for next month, it would scuttle efforts to resume negotiations with Washington and even resume nuclear and long-range missile tests. Analysts said that its recent short-range weapons tests were a warning that if its demand was not met, the North might escalate tensions with longer-range missile tests.

Weeks before Mr. Kim met with Mr. Trump in Singapore in June last year in the first-ever summit meeting between North Korea and the United States, Mr. Kim announced a moratorium on his country’s nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests. Mr. Trump has since repeatedly touted the absence of such tests as his biggest diplomatic achievement in dealing with Mr. Kim.

With North Korea’s latest tests involving short-range missiles, Mr. Kim did not abandon his moratorium. But they violated the United Nations Security Council resolutions that bar the country from developing or testing ballistic missile technologies, South Korean officials said.

Mr. Trump downplayed the significance of the North’s recent missile tests last Thursday, calling them “smaller ones” and repeating that he was still getting along “very well” with Mr. Kim.

“My relationship with Kim Jong-un is a very good one, as I’m sure you’ve seen,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “I like him; he likes me. We’ll see what happens.”

The Singapore meeting ended with a vague agreement in which Mr. Trump committed to building new relations and providing security guarantees for North Korea in return for Mr. Kim’s agreement to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

But when the leaders met again in Hanoi, Vietnam, in February, they failed to agree on how to implement their earlier deal.

The Hanoi talks collapsed when Mr. Kim demanded that Washington lift all major sanctions against his country in return for the dismantling of its nuclear complex in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang. Mr. Trump insisted on a more comprehensive breaking up of the North’s nuclear programs, including its nuclear weapons and missiles.

Mr. Kim has since said he would give Washington until the end of the year to return to the negotiating table with “new calculations.”

“This type of saber rattling is not threatening, but rather is intended to get the attention of North Korea’s more powerful neighbors,” Daniel L. Davis, a senior fellow with the Defense Priorities research institute in Washington, said by email about the Wednesday tests. “Kim Jong-un wants to negotiate and signal his ability to take actions the U.S. and others don’t like in an effort to speed up diplomacy.”

“There’s an opening to negotiate for freezes and potentially rollbacks in exchange for limited sanctions relief,” Mr. Davis added. “But unless Washington is willing to make such trade-offs and normalize relations, expect Kim to continue developing weapons and testing them.”

Kim and Trump Back at Square 1: If U.S. Keeps Sanctions, North Will Keep Nuclear Program

Nearly two years into his presidency and more than six months after his historic summit meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, President Trump finds himself essentially back where he was at the beginning in achieving the ambitious goal of getting Mr. Kim to relinquish his nuclear arsenal.

That was the essential message of Mr. Kim’s annual New Year’s televised speech, where he reiterated that international sanctions must be lifted before North Korea will give up a single weapon, dismantle a single missile site or stop producing nuclear material.

The list of recent North Korean demands was a clear indicator of how the summit meeting in Singapore last June altered the optics of the relationship more than the reality. Those demands were very familiar from past confrontations: that

all joint military training between the United States and South Korea be stopped, that

American nuclear and military capability within easy reach of the North be withdrawn, and that

a peace treaty ending the Korean War be completed.

“It’s fair to say that not much has changed, although we now have more clarity regarding North Korea’s bottom line,’’ Evans J.R. Revere, a veteran American diplomat and former president of the Korea Society, wrote in an email.

“Pyongyang refused to accept the United States’ definition of ‘denuclearization’ in Singapore,’’ he wrote.

To the United States, that means

the North gives up its entire nuclear arsenal;

in the North’s view, it includes

a reciprocal pullback of any American ability to threaten it with nuclear weapons. “

The two competing visions of denuclearization have not changed since then.”

Mr. Trump and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, who is supposed to turn Mr. Trump’s enthusiasms into diplomatic achievements, dispute such conclusions. They note that the tone of one of the world’s fiercest armed standoffs has improved. It has, and both leaders say they want to meet again.

In a tweet on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump cited Mr. Kim’s offers not to produce or proliferate weapons, without mentioning the many caveats. He went on to say that he looked forward “to meeting with Chairman Kim who realizes so well that North Korea possesses great economic potential!”

Mr. Kim’s message, delivered in the style of a fireside chat from what appeared to be his library, had none of the old-style threats of turning Seoul into a “sea of fire” or striking the United States with a “nuclear sword of justice.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, has never returned to his 2017 warning that any hostile moves by the North would be “met by a fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

He swung to the other extreme, declaring after Singapore that the nuclear threat from the North was over — a statement even his most loyal aides have not repeated — and that he and one of the world’s most notorious dictators “fell in love.”

.. By some measures there has been modest progress. It has been 13 months since the North tested a nuclear weapon or a long-range missile, a change that Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo cite as the first fruits of what some officials now concede will be a long diplomatic push.

.. But Mr. Trump’s strategic goal, from the moment he vowed to “solve” the North Korea problem rather than repeat the mistakes of past presidents, has been to end the North Korean nuclear and missile threat, not suspend it in place.

Mr. Trump dispatched his first secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, to Seoul in March 2017 to declare that a mere nuclear freeze would not be enough. Back then, Mr. Tillerson declared there would be no negotiations, and certainly no lifting of sanctions, until the North’s dismantling had begun. A nuclear freeze would essentially enshrine “a comprehensive set of capabilities,” he argued.

The decision Mr. Trump must make now is whether to backtrack on the objective of zero North Korean nuclear weapons even if that means accepting the North as a nuclear-armed state, as the United States has done with Pakistan, India and Israel.

.. “Kim seems to be saying outright that his patience is running thin at the continued insistence on unilateral disarmament,” Vipin Narang, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who follows North Korea closely, wrote in an email. “The stick was the threat to go down a ‘new path’ if the U.S. doesn’t reciprocate.”

.. To hard-liners like Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who excoriated past administrations for making concessions ahead of disarmament, capitulating to Mr. Kim on this issue is anathema.

.. But to those who have viewed Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” as a strategy bound to fail, Mr. Kim’s offer of a step-by-step approach is the only pathway to success — though maybe a success that constrains, rather than eliminates, the North’s nuclear ambitions.

“When zero weapons is not on the table — and it’s not — then something less than 100 nuclear weapons seems better than the alternative,’’ said Robert S. Litwak, author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout” and a scholar at the Wilson Center in Washington.

.. Oddly, Mr. Litwak noted, merely constraining a nuclear capability — rather than eliminating it — was Mr. Trump’s complaint about the Iran nuclear deal, which he abandoned last year. Mr. Trump argued that the Iran deal was not a permanent solution and that the United States was safer reimposing sanctions rather than sticking with an accord that would allow Iran to resume enriching nuclear material — but not build weapons — in 2030.

Now, facing a North Korean state that already has 20 to 60 such weapons — Iran never had any — Mr. Trump must decide whether it is better to constrain the growth, or stick with the position he defended so hotly as a presidential candidate and into his first year in office.

Some advisers around Mr. Trump, including some who have left in the past year, believe that the number of weapons means little to the president; he wants to be seen as the man who ended the Korean War. That is why, one former adviser said recently, Mr. Trump kept repeating the suggestion that he might win a Nobel Peace Prize.

“The bottom line is that Pyongyang wants to keep its nuclear program, engage the United States in a process designed to improve relations, reassure the United States that it will not use its nukes or proliferate,” Mr. Revere noted, and “reap the benefits of better ties with Washington.”

“Are these disparate and contradictory goals reconcilable?” he asked. “Probably not.”

Putin claims new missile will make defense systems useless

The Kremlin reports the long-range, nuclear-capable Russian missile can strike anywhere in the world and easily evade missile defense systems; Lucas Tomlinson reports from the Pentagon.

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What made North Korea’s weapons programs so much scarier in 2017

If the higher estimate is true, that would mean that North Korea has a bomb almost 17 times the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

.. David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said he believes that the Sept. 3 bomb was a “real H-Bomb” — suggesting that North Korea wasn’t lying when it said it had created a two-stage thermonuclear device shortly before this test. If this is true, it shows that North Korea has now mastered the more complicated technology that entered the U.S. and Soviet arsenals in the 1950s after the first wave of nuclear weapons.

.. Such a device dramatically increases the damage that could be inflicted on a city. It also could mean that North Korea’s missile systems can afford to be significantly less accurate when used in a real-life attack because the blast itself would be so much bigger.

.. After failed tests in 2016, North Korea appears to have shut down the Musudan program and replaced it with something better.

.. In just one year, Cotton said, Kim Jong Un has unveiled six new missile systems. In contrast, his father, Kim Jong Il, tested only two new missiles during his time as leader, and North Korean founder Kim Il Sung tested three.

.. North Korea could probably build up to a bigger event: what has been called the “Juche bird,” a test of a missile loaded with a live nuclear weapon, probably above the Pacific Ocean. “A lot of folks in the U.S. have said North Korea still lacks the capability to put it all together,” Cotton said. “North Korea has made several statements suggesting they think they might need to show us once and for all that they do have that capability.”