SEOUL, South Korea (Dispatches) — North Korea on Tuesday fired what appeared to be a ballistic missile into its eastern sea, its second launch in a week, following leader Kim Jong Un’s calls to expand its nuclear weapons program.
The launches follow a series of weapons tests in 2021 that underscored how North Korea is continuing to expand its military capabilities during a self-imposed pandemic lockdown and deadlocked nuclear talks with the United States.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea fired what likely was a ballistic missile from the area of its northern Jagang province. It said the weapon flew 700 kilometers (434 miles) at a maximum speed of around Mach 10 before landing in waters off its eastern coast, demonstrating a more advanced capability than North Korea’s launch last week.
The North’s state media described the earlier launch as a successful test of a hypersonic missile, a type of weaponry it claimed to have first tested in September.
South Korean officials didn’t provide a specific assessment of the missile type, but some experts said North Korea may have tested its hypersonic missile again in response to the South Korean military playing down its previous test.
Japan’s Defense Ministry said the suspected ballistic missile landed outside the country’s exclusive economic zone.
The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said the launch did not pose an “immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies.”
Still, the launch corresponded with an order issued to ground some flights on the U.S. West Coast.
KCRA, a television station in Sacramento, California, quoted officials at both its local airport and San Francisco International Airport as saying flights stopped for around five minutes at 2:30 p.m. local time, which was just minutes after the launch. They attributed the stop to an order by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Air-traffic controllers in other West Coast areas similarly ordered aircraft down, according to recordings shared online.
Hypersonic weapons, which fly at speeds in excess of Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, could pose a crucial challenge to missile defense systems because of their speed and maneuverability. Such weapons were on a wish-list of sophisticated military assets Kim unveiled last year along with multi-warhead missiles, spy satellites, solid-fueled long-range missiles and submarine-launched nuclear missiles.