North Korea boasts of ‘world’s strongest’ missile, but experts say it’s oversized

North Korea's latest ICBM test raises concerns about technological hurdles and survivability, with experts questioning its effectiveness in war.

North Korea boasted on Friday (November 1, 2024) that the new intercontinental ballistic missile it just test-launched is “the world’s strongest,” a claim seen as pure propaganda after experts assessed it as being too big to be useful in a war situation.

The ICBM launched on Thursday (October 31, 2024) flew higher and for a longer duration than any other weapon North Korea has tested. But foreign experts say the test failed to show North Korea has mastered some of the last remaining technological hurdles to possess functioning ICBMs that can strike the mainland U.S.

The North’s Korean Central News Agency identified the missile as a Hwasong-19 and called it “the world’s strongest strategic missile” and “the perfected weapon system.” The official media outlet said leader Kim Jong-un observed the launch, describing it as an expression of North Korea’s resolve to respond to external threats to North Korea’s security.

The color and shape of the exhaust flames seen in North Korean media photos of the launch suggest the missile uses preloaded solid fuel, which makes weapons more agile and harder to detect than liquid propellants that in general must be fueled beforehand.

But experts say the photos show the ICBM and its launch vehicle are both oversized, raising a serious question about their wartime mobility and survivability.

“When missiles get bigger, what happens? The vehicles get larger, too. As the transporter-erector launchers get bigger, their mobility decreases,” Lee Sangmin, an expert at South Korea’s Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

The Hwasong-19 was estimated to be at least 28 meters long while advanced U.S. and Russian ICBMs are less than 20 meters long, said Chang Young-keun, a missile expert at Seoul’s Korea Research Institute for National Strategy. He suggested that the missile’s size likely helped South Korean intelligence authorities detect the launch plan in advance. “In the event of a conflict, such an exposure makes the weapon a target of a pre-emptive attack by opponents so there would be a big issue of survivability,” Mr. Chang said.