On Sunday South Korean President Moon Jae-in said the launch takes North Korea a step closer to fully scrapping a self-imposed moratorium on testing its longest-range intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Kim has said he is no longer bound by that moratorium, which included a stop to nuclear weapons tests and was announced in 2018 amid a flurry of diplomacy and summits with then-US President Donald Trump.
North Korea suggested this month it could restart those testing activities because the United States and its allies had shown no sign of dropping their “hostile policies”.
It is unclear if IRBMs such as the Hwasong-12 were included in Kim’s moratorium, but those, too, have not been tested since 2017.
That year North Korea flight-tested the Hwasong-12 at least six times, achieving three successful flights and three failures.
Controversially, in two of those tests North Korea launched the missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
In Sunday’s test, North Korea said it fired the missile on an elevated trajectory “in consideration of the safety of neighbouring countries.”
The test “confirmed the accuracy, safety, and operational effectiveness of the produced Hwasong-12 type weapon system,” KCNA said.
For all the latest world News Click Here
