Kim Jong Un and the Bomb by Ankit Panda

Author:Ankit Panda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Hwasong-14: The First Milestone

July 4 is best known as the United States’ Independence Day, but it also holds special significance for North Korean missile launches in the twenty-first century. In 2006, in the evening hours of Independence Day celebrations in the United States—the morning of July 5 in North Korea—Kim Jong Il had decided to make good on an earlier North Korean threat to do away with the 1999 moratorium agreed with the U.S., conducting a series of missile tests. Eighteen years later, Kim Jong Un kept his father’s old tricks in mind for July 4, 2017, when it was his turn to launch a missile as Independence Day fireworks lit the skies on the U.S. East Coast. The new Hwasong-14 was launched with the “March 18 Revolution” engine first developed for the intermediate-range Hwasong-12—the ‘Guam-killer.’ News reports quickly began to cite South Korean, Japanese, and U.S. data on the missile’s trajectory, and that is when it became apparent that North Korea might just have crossed an important technological threshold.

The missile flew to a modest range of 933 kilometers, but unease swiftly set in after reports picked up on another data point: the missile had flown for thirty-seven minutes. Given that flighttime, there was no way this was something short-range. The discrepancy between the two figures made clear that the North Koreans must have lofted a massive missile to shorten its range. After several hours, newspapers in South Korea and Japan reported that the missile had flown to an apogee—or maximum altitude—of 2,802 kilometers. To place that altitude in context, the International Space Station normally orbits at a little over 400 kilometers. Putting together the three pieces of data, the reality of what had just transpired hit us in the face: North Korea had just successfully flight-tested its first-ever ICBM, crossing a longstanding benchmark and making good on a task that Kim had set out at the beginning of the year.

Nearly a year and a half on from the last sighting of the “unlucky” Hwasong-13, Kim Jong Un’s 2017 New Year’s Day address had not been subtle: he remarked that over the previous year North Korea had “entered the final stage of preparation for the test launch of [an] intercontinental ballistic missile.” All signs pointed to the threshold being crossed in 2017 and, on July 4, it had finally happened. Later that same night, Korean Central Television held a special broadcast, all but underlining the historic significance of the day’s momentous achievement. Ri Chun Hee, KCTV’s former premier news anchor, came out of retirement to make the announcement. Minutes later, the Hwasong-14, North Korea’s first successfully flight-tested ICBM, was revealed to the world. As we saw with the Hwasong-13, overseas observers of North Korea’s weapons programs had grown used to Pyongyang showing off ICBM designs, no matter how impractical they might have appeared. But the missile Ri introduced that night was the real deal.

Kim Jong Un’s March 18 Revolution engine had finally had its first proper outing. Given that the

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