SEOUL — Although North Korea has conducted four intercontinental ballistic missile tests like the one on Thursday, the country has never launched a missile on a trajectory that could potentially hit another continent.
Its ICBMs have soared extremely high, reaching a top altitude of up to 3,852 miles, but they all fell into waters west of Japan.
Launches at those angles were designed to prevent the missiles from flying over Japan, an act that would be considered extremely provocative by the United States and its allies. But they left open one of the biggest mysteries about the North Korean program: Can its missiles actually fly across an ocean and hit an intercontinental target?
“It’s clear that the North Korean missiles are powerful enough to cover an ICBM range,” said Lee Byong-chul, an expert in nuclear proliferation at Kyungnam University’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
“But one unanswered question is whether the country has mastered the so-called reentry technologies, which you need to protect the nuclear warhead from the intense heat and friction as the ICBM crashes through the earth’s atmosphere.”
It remained unclear whether the launch on Thursday had demonstrated any significant progress with the reentry technologies or even if it had anything to do with testing a multiple independent reentry vehicle, or MIRV.
To become the bona fide nuclear power North Korea says it is, the country also needs to make its ICBMs smaller and lighter so that they can carry bigger and more powerful payloads with the same amount of fuel.
North Korea’s newest ICBM — the Hwasong-17 — was the biggest mobile ICBM the world had seen when it was first unveiled during a military parade in October 2020. The Hwasong-17 is designed as a MIRV missile that carries multiple nuclear warheads, missile experts say.
North Korea has conducted six nuclear tests, but all of them took place in underground tunnels. Ri Yong-ho, then foreign minister of North Korea, warned in 2017 that the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was considering testing “an unprecedented scale hydrogen bomb” over the Pacific in response to then President Donald J. Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” his country.
An atmospheric nuclear test would be the first such test globally since China detonated a device in 1980. Professor Lee doubted that North Korea would go so far as to attempt such a daring provocation. But one of the country’s logical next steps could be launching a dummy ICBM over the Pacific Ocean to demonstrate that its missile can travel an intercontinental range.
“That itself will be an extremely provocative maneuver, one the North would attempt only when it was sure about its technologies,” Professor Lee said.
When tensions ran high over Mr. Trump’s threat to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea in 2017, it warned that it would fire four ballistic missiles in a “ring of fire” around Guam, home to major American military bases in the Western Pacific.