North Korea claims to have tested a hypersonic missile, this Wednesday (5), the second alleged test of this weapon during the regime of Kim Jong Un.
If the claims made by North Korea’s state media are true, and at some point the country is able to deploy a hypersonic weapon, this could have profound implications for the security situation in Asia.
But after North Korea said it ran its first hypersonic test in September and its second this week, analysts are cautious.
“A hypersonic missile that can defeat advanced missile defense systems is game-changing if a nuclear warhead is attached to it,” Drew Thompson, former US Department of Defense official and visiting senior researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy , from the National University of Singapore, said after the September test.
But he warned: “This is a huge ‘if’. Having and wanting are not the same thing”.
After Wednesday’s test, Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute, a private South Korean think tank, said more time and refinements would be needed before Pyongyang could use a hypersonic weapon.
“North Korea will need at least two or three more test launches in the future to complete its hypersonic missile,” he said.
What is a hypersonic missile?
When we refer to a hypersonic missile, what we are really talking about is its payload, or what is attached to the top of the rocket. In this case, the payload is what is called a hypersonic glider vehicle (HGV).
According to experts, HGVs can theoretically fly at up to 20 times the speed of sound and can be very maneuverable during flight, making them nearly impossible to bring down.
Like ballistic missiles, hypersonic glider weapons are launched by rockets into the atmosphere. But while a ballistic missile warhead is largely gravity-fed once it begins its descent to the target from a height of 1,000 kilometers, hypersonic ones dive back to Earth before flattening their flight path – flying just tens of kilometers above the ground, according to a report on hypersonics by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The weapon then uses internal navigation devices to make course corrections and keep it on target as it travels up to 12 times the speed of sound, the report says.
Who has hypersonic weapons?
Only two countries, Russia and China, are believed to have deployable hypersonic missiles.
In December 2019, Russia said its hypersonic missile system – known as the Avangard – had entered service.
In a speech to the Russian Parliament in 2018, President Vladimir Putin called the Avangard system “virtually invulnerable” for Western air defenses.
In January 2020, Putin oversaw the testing of a second hypersonic system, the Kinzhal, in Crimea.
And in November, Russia said it had successfully tested its Zircon hypersonic missile.
In August, China tested a missile that was dropped from an HGV, according to the US military.
“They launched a long-range missile,” General John Hyten, then vice president of the Board of Heads of State, told CBS News. “He went around the world, was released by a hypersonic glider vehicle that glided all the way back to China, and which hit a target in China.”
China has denied the allegations, saying what the US calls the hypersonic weapons test was a “routine experiment with a spacecraft.”
At a 2019 military parade, China displayed its DF-17 missile, which can be used to deploy a hypersonic glider vehicle. A report by the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, citing US defense officials, says the DF-17 can launch a warhead within a few meters of its intended target, at a range of up to 2,500 kilometers.
According to a report last year by the Arms Control Association (ACA) in Washington DC, the United States is working on eight types of hypersonic weapons. And the military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said it successfully tested a hypersonic weapon last fall.
Can we trust North Korea’s claims?
Kim’s regime certainly tested a missile on Wednesday and released an image of the test on Thursday.
Missile experts who saw the photo aren’t sure what was shown.
“This missile carries a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or MaRV. The North Koreans are classifying it as ‘hypersonic’, which isn’t wrong, but just to be clear, that doesn’t mean it’s a new type of weapon,” Joshua Pollack, senior research associate at the Institute of Middlebury International Studies, California.
“Whether we classify this as HGV (as indicated) or MaRV, it’s not confirmed,” said Joseph Dempsey, an associate researcher for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in a social media post.
A MaRV is essentially a missile warhead that alters its flight path after re-entering the atmosphere once it separates from the rocket that launched it. It’s technology the US military has employed for decades and South Korea has demonstrated it before, according to Pollack.
What distinguishes a MaRV from an HGV is the latter’s ability to flatten its flight path and then ascend and then dive into a target.
North Korea said Wednesday’s test “evaluated the performance of the new lateral movement technique.”
“Having been detached after its launch, the missile made a lateral movement of 120 km in the flying distance of the hypersonic gliding warhead from the azimuth (measurement of horizontal direction, defined in degrees) of initial launch to the azimuth of the target and reached precisely a set target 700 km away,” state media said.
Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, put this in layman’s terms, saying that North Korea has tested a warhead that can “move up and down several times like a hang glider descending from a mountain, and fly left and right […] for a considerable distance, but still accurately hitting the target.”
Why are people worried?
“North Korea’s maneuverability claims remain significant and could pose additional challenges to missile defense,” said Dempsey, the analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, on the social network.
Speaking after the North Korean test in September, Roderick Lee, research director at the China Institute of Aerospace Studies at American Air University, said the hypersonics’ low-altitude flight paths mean they stay under radar for longer periods. which means less time for missile defense systems to lock and engage.
“It makes things really complicated for the defense,” added Lee.
There are some arguments that this makes hypersonics a destabilizing first-attack weapon.
“Each side may believe they need to attack first and fast to achieve their goals. This dynamic – often called crisis instability – could trigger the onset of a conflict, even if neither party to the crisis initially planned to strike first,” wrote analysts Kelley Sayler and Amy Woolf in a report for the Congressional Research Service of the United States in November.
What happens next?
North Korea is showing that it will not allay claims that it is a victim of Western powers and must develop military deterrents to what it sees as possible aggressive moves by enemies like the US and South Korea.
“Instead of expressing willingness to denuclearization talks or interest in an end-of-war declaration, North Korea is signaling that neither the Omicron variant nor domestic food shortages will halt its aggressive missile development,” said Leif- Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha Womans University in Seoul.
Cheong, the director of the South Korean think tank, said the fact that leader Kim Jong Un did not directly observe Wednesday’s test shows that Pyongyang wants to portray him as part of the
normal course of development of military defenses, which means we can expect more.
“The missile launch was a test conducted in accordance with the five-year defense development plan decided at the 8th Party Congress,” said Park Won-gon, professor of North Korean studies at Ewha Womans University.
“This is North Korea’s demand (to the international community) to remove the principled difference over weapons development and say that these tests are no different from South Korea’s missile development.”
This content was originally created in English.
original version
Reference: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
