Understand reasons that may have led North Korea to launch missile over Japan

North Korea has launched 23 ballistic missiles so far in 2022 — the most in a year since Kim Jong Un took power — but only one of them flew over the territory of Japan, marking a considerable escalation in its weapons testing program. These may be the reasons for your decision:

sign of ambition

Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, routinely fires its missiles into waters off the coast of the Korean peninsula, making the flight over Japan, the first since 2017, considerably more provocative. And this is for both practical reasons — the possibility of impacting the civilian population, for example — and symbolic reasons.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of the CNS’s East Asia Non-Proliferation Program, called it escalation because “it’s provocative to fire a missile at your neighbor.” “Especially for the Japanese, it feels like a violation of their sovereignty,” Lewis said.

According to experts, it is a sign of Kim’s ambitions for North Korea’s weapons development and what is to come.

practical reasons

North Korea’s reasons for launching the missile at Japan could be practical, according to Joseph Dempsey, a defense researcher and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Typically, Pyongyang tests long-range missiles on a high trajectory and these land in western Japan. These altitude tests, however, “do not present a realistic flight profile”, so that “some doubts may remain about the missile’s reliability if it ever had to be used operationally, in particular its ability to withstand the different forces that would be encountered.” are exerted on and also their relative accuracy over longer distances,” said Dempsey.

In other words, taking the flight path it did allows North Korea to measure its accuracy and endurance better than usual tests.

explore instability

Robert Ward, senior fellow for Japanese Security Studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said that “North Korea may be trying to exploit the unstable international situation, which can be seen as a tailwind.” In this regard, he pointed to the multiple security threats that Japan already faces, from an aggressive Russia in the north and China in the south.

Lewis disagreed, saying that while North Korea sometimes responds to or retaliates against specific actions by Western actors or groups, more often than not “they have their own timeline.”

Anti-Japanese rhetoric of 2017

The last time North Korea launched a missile at Japan was in 2017 over the island of Hokkaido.

The launch came after North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency said that “the four islands of the (Japanese) archipelago were to be sunk into the sea by the (action of) the Juche nuclear bomb”, a reference to North Korea’s dominant ideology.

Message to the United States?

When did North Korea make this releasewas also interpreted as an attempt to send a message to the United States, since at the time it traveled a distance equivalent to that of the country and Guam, the US territory that Pyongyang had threatened.

In this case, the distance traveled by the missile until it landed in the Pacific Ocean, according to reports, was even greater than between North Korea and Guam: it covered about 4,600 km, while between the two territories it is 3,380 km.

On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida reaffirmed the alliance between Tokyo and Washington to promote the complete denuclearization of North Korea in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions and pledged to strengthen cooperation with the United States and South Korea.

*Featured by Yoonjung Seo, Brad Lendon, Junko Ogura and Emiko Jozuka in Tokyo.