North Korea says ICBM launch was response to rivals' drills

The ICBM launch was North Korea’s fourth missile event in about a week as it ratcheted up a tit-for-tat response to U.S.-South Korean military drills

North Korea said March 17 that its latest intercontinental ballistic missile launch was intended to send a “stronger warning” over combined U.S. military exercises with South Korea, blaming those for creating a “most unstable security environment” in the region.

Thursday’s launch from North Korea’s capital area came hours before South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol traveled to Tokyo for a summit with Japanese Prime Minster Fumio Kishida. The meeting underscored Seoul’s urgency to tighten security cooperation with a fellow U.S. ally in the face of North Korean nuclear threats.

The ICBM launch was North Korea’s fourth missile event in about a week as it ratcheted up a tit-for-tat response to U.S.-South Korean military drills, the biggest of their kind in years, which began Monday and run through March 23.

North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said leader Kim Jong Un supervised the test-firing of the Hwasong-17 ICBM from Pyongyang’s international airport and stressed the need to “strike fear into the enemies” over what it called the “open hostility” shown to the North by the large-scale exercises.

Launched at a high angle to avoid the territory of North Korea's neighbors, the missile reached an maximum altitude of 6,045 kilometers (3,756 miles) and traveled 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) before landing in waters off the country’s eastern coast, the KCNA said.

The South Korean and Japanese militaries had released similar flight details, which indicate the missile had a potential range to reach the U.S. mainland. It remains unclear whether the North has mastered key technologies to create a nuclear weapon small enough to fit on its long-range rockets or to ensure that the warhead survives the harsh conditions of atmospheric re-entry.

KCNA said the ICBM launch drill sends a “stronger warning” to its rivals who are escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula with their “frantic, provocative and aggressive large-scale war drills." The test also was designed to confirm the reliability of the weapons system, the agency said.