U. S. and Japanese warships sailed to the waters near northwestern Japan this week to support American intelligence agencies in a search for the debris of North Korea’s latest long-range missile test.
U. S. and Japanese warships sailed to the waters near northwestern Japan this week to support American intelligence agencies in a search for the debris of North Korea’s latest long-range missile test.
The searchers hope to find clues to the makeup of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range missile launched Wednesday that is believed to be a variant of the Hwasong-14 fired off in two flights in July.
The missile was fired around 3 a.m. Wednesday local time and flew 50 minutes and with an estimated range farther than all previous missile tests. It flew some 2,500 miles into space but only a distance of just over 600 miles from the launch site on the Korean Peninsula.
The two ICBM tests in July flew in similar lofted trajectories, but their flight times were 39 minutes and 45 minutes, respectively.
A Pentagon official said Navy and Japanese warships that were in the Sea of Japan at the time of the test steamed to the impact area, located about 155 miles west of Aomori prefecture, the northernmost part of Japan’s main island of Honshu. The search is expected to be difficult since intelligence reports indicated that the missile appeared to break up before landing.
Previous launches have provided a wealth of intelligence on the foreign components found in North Korean test missiles.
For example, debris recovered from a Feb. 7,2016, rocket launch revealed several foreign-sourced commercial components. They included ball bearings with Cyrillic characters indicating Russian-origin components. Also, a Chinese infrared camera was recovered and traced by a U. N. panel of experts to the Beijing East Machinery High-Tech Technology Co. Ltd. Pressure transmitters manufactured in Britain also were found and traced backed to transshipments from Taiwan to North Korea.
The components were recovered from the debris of an Unha-3 space launcher that is based on North Korea’s older Taepodong-2 ICBM.
The Hwasong-15 launch was the first since North Korea fired an intermediate-range missile on Sept. 15 that flew over Japan’s northern Hokkaido island.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Robert Manning said initial assessments indicate the missile was an ICBM launched from Sain Ni, North Korea, that traveled 620 miles before landing.
“We are working with our interagency partners on a more detailed assessment of the launch,” Col. Manning said in a statement, adding that the North American Aerospace Defense Command assessed that the launch did not pose a threat to North America, U. S. territories or allies.
At a White House meeting with President Trump, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said the missile “went higher, frankly, than any previous shot they’ve taken.”
“It’s a research-and-development effort on their part to continue building ballistic missiles that could threaten everywhere in the world, basically,” Mr. Mattis said. “The bottom line is it’s a continued effort to build a threat — a ballistic missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace and, certainly, the United States.”
North Korea’s state-run KCNA news agency said the missile can carry a “superlarge heavy warhead which is capable of striking the whole mainland of the U. S.”
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