North Korea claims revolutionary new weapon

North Korean state media said Thursday that the country's top missile scientists have verified a new multiple-warhead delivery system that could significantly complicate defense planning for the United States and its allies against the regime of Kim Jong Un.

Senior officials from North Korea's ruling Workers' Party oversaw “tests of separation control and guidance of individual mobile warheads” as part of an assessment aimed at securing the country's multiple re-entry vehicle capability to independent targeting, or MIRV, the official Korean Central News Agency said of the previous day's launch event.

MIRVs, first developed by the United States, allow a single intercontinental ballistic missile to drop multiple hypersonic nuclear warheads at different speeds, delivering the weapon's payload to separate ground targets to overwhelm defense systems. air defense.

Three photographs carried by KCNA reportedly showed several nuclear warheads and then a decoy separating from an intermediate-range ballistic missile, which neighboring South Korea and Japan said had been launched from the area around Pyongyang.

“The separate mobile warheads were correctly guided to the three coordinated targets,” KCNA said after the regime's first test firing in a month, calling the acquisition of the MIRV capability the party's “top priority.”

In Seoul, however, the South Korean military rejected the North's claims that the test was successful, reversing its earlier assessment that the hypersonic missile exploded in mid-flight and scattered debris in the eastern seas of the two Koreas.

Lee Sung Joon, a spokesman for South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters Thursday that the North Korean missile exploded shortly after takeoff, while MIRVs typically release warheads during their launch. descent.

Colin Zwirko of the trade journal NK News said the day before that the test likely took place east of Kim's mansion in Pyongyang, the same site where North Korea fired a salvo of missiles on April 22 from multiple launch systems.

KCNA's decision not to release photos of the warheads hitting their targets, as well as Kim's apparent absence from the event, both raised questions, he added.

If proven, however, it would be North Korea's first known MIRV test and another step on Kim's sophisticated weapons wish list for 2021, alongside spy satellites, Solid-fueled ICBMs and nuclear missiles launched from submarines.

It also appears to be another example of Pyongyang ignoring UN Security Council resolutions banning the development of ballistic technologies.

The North Korean embassy in Beijing did not respond to several emails seeking comment.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Nuclear-weapon states are racing to perfect strategic hypersonic technologies such as MIRV launch systems, designed to evade interception and therefore increase the credibility of the operator's strikes.

In March, India successfully tested a MIRV missile, the Agni-5, which it said launched multiple nuclear warheads about 2,000 miles away, about half its declared operational range.

The Agni-5 was built with an eye on China, its northern neighbor, with the missile putting most of the Chinese mainland within its range.

North Korea's missile test appears to be a preemptive response to three-day trilateral military exercises that began Thursday between the United States, South Korea and Japan.

The US Indo-Pacific Command, based in Hawaii, said the multi-domain exercise dubbed Freedom Edge “will promote trilateral interoperability and protect freedom for peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific, including the Korean Peninsula.

“The exercise will focus on cooperative ballistic missile defense, air defense, anti-submarine warfare, search and rescue, maritime interdiction and defensive cyber training,” the statement said.

Also Thursday, Seoul said it would resume broadcasting propaganda through loudspeakers near the Korean Demilitarized Zone if Pyongyang continued to send balloons carrying trash across the border, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

About 180 waste balloons from North Korea, some carrying sewage, fell on South Korean territory on Wednesday evening for the third consecutive day, bringing the total since the end of May to more than 2,000.