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WASHINGTON: North Korea launched several test missiles just days after a visit to the region by top U.S. defense and diplomatic officials, a U.S. official said on Tuesday (March 23), in Pyongyang’s first open challenge. to the Biden government.
Two missiles were fired on Sunday, the official confirmed, echoing Pyongyang’s past practices using its missile tests to provoke both Washington and Seoul.
While the official did not describe the missiles, the Washington Post called them short-range.
The launches came after intelligence warnings that Pyongyang might be preparing such action.
The official said the United States detected the launches while they were taking place.
South Korea’s military said two cruise missiles were fired off North Korea’s west coast on Sunday.
Seoul had detected signs that a test was imminent and was monitoring it in real time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told reporters on Wednesday. The JCS reports tests of North Korea’s advanced weapons, such as nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, in near real time, but not tests of lower-range, shorter-range weapons.
Analysts took them as a modest challenge to President Joe Biden’s new administration just as it makes initial efforts to engage North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in denuclearization talks.
READ: North Korea Ignores US Offer for Talks, Citing Hostile Policy
But Biden played down the latest activity, saying “not much has changed.”
“No, according to the Department of Defense everything remains the same. There is no new problem in what they did,” he told reporters on his return from a visit to Ohio, when asked if the test was a provocation.
The launches came just days after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Japan and South Korea to discuss their alliances and security issues in the region, and Korea’s The nuclear-armed North is considered a central threat.
They also followed joint exercises on March 8-17 by the defense forces of the United States and South Korea.
While Blinken and Austin were in Seoul on March 18, North Korea’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui accused the United States of a “lunatic ‘North Korean threat’ theory and unfounded rhetoric about the ‘complete denuclearization’ “.
Such launches, especially nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, are often accompanied by boastful announcements from Pyongyang and strident attacks from Seoul.
North Korea expert Martyn Williams of the Stimson Center called the silence “curious.”
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“North Korea usually announces such tests after the fact through state media, but nothing this time,” he wrote on Twitter.
“The tests are also generally reported fairly quickly after they are done through the Japanese and Korean media, but nothing.”
Another North Korean expert, Jeffrey Lewis, said the tests could have been short-range coastal defense cruise missiles.
“If that’s what it is, it’s a fairly mild response to a military exercise between the United States and the ROK,” he said, referring to the ROK.
