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    North Korea, in the Spotlight Over Ukraine, Launches a Long-Range Missile

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    The launch, into waters west of Japan, came shortly after the United States and South Korea criticized the North for sending troops to join Russia’s war. North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile off its east coast on Thursday, South Korean defense officials said, shortly after the United States and South Korea condemned the country for deploying troops near Ukraine to join Russia’s war effort.The missile was fired from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, at a deliberately steep angle so that it reached an unusually high altitude but did not fly over Japan, the South Korean military said in a brief statement. The missile landed in waters between North Korea and Japan.The military said it was analyzing data to learn more about the missile, but that it believed it was an ICBM. North Korea last tested a long-range missile​ in December, when it test-fired its solid-fueled Hwasong-18 ICBM.The launch on Thursday was the North’s first major weapons test since September, when it fired a new type of Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile, which it said could carry a “super-large” conventional warhead weighing 4.5 tons.On Wednesday, South Korean defense intelligence officials told lawmakers that North Korea might conduct long-range missile tests before the American presidential election next week. They also said that the North was preparing to conduct its seventh underground nuclear test, in a bid to raise tensions and gain diplomatic leverage with the next U.S. president. North Korea conducted its last nuclear test in 2017.In recent weeks, North Korea has posed a fresh security challenge to Washington and its allies by sending an estimated 11,000 troops to Russia to fight in its war against Ukraine. Thousands of them, outfitted with Russian uniforms and equipment, have moved closer to the front lines, preparing themselves for possible battle against Ukrainian troops, South Korean and American officials said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Warns Allies Russia Could Put a Nuclear Weapon Into Orbit This Year

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      The American assessments are divided, however, and President Vladimir Putin denied having such an intention, saying that Russia was “categorically against” it.American intelligence agencies have told their closest European allies that if Russia is going to launch a nuclear weapon into orbit, it will probably do so this year — but that it might instead launch a harmless “dummy” warhead into orbit to leave the West guessing about its capabilities.The assessment came as American intelligence officials conducted a series of rushed, classified briefings for their NATO and Asian allies, as details of the American assessment of Russia’s intentions began to leak out.The American intelligence agencies are sharply divided in their opinion about what President Vladimir V. Putin is planning, and on Tuesday Mr. Putin rejected the accusation that he intended to place a nuclear weapon in orbit and his defense minister said the intelligence warning was manufactured in an effort to get Congress to authorize more aid for Ukraine.During a meeting with the defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, Mr. Putin said Russia had always been “categorically against” placing nuclear weapons in space, and had respected the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits weaponizing space, including the placement of nuclear weapons in orbit.“We not only call for the observance of the existing agreements that we have in this area,” he was quoted as saying by the Russian state media, “but we have proposed many times to strengthen these joint efforts.”On Wednesday, Mr. Putin reinforced the central role he believes Russia’s nuclear arsenal plays in the country’s defenses: Visiting an aviation factory, he climbed into the bomb bay of a Tu-160M strategic bomber, the most modern in the Russian fleet.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Fears Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space

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      American spy agencies are divided on whether Moscow would go so far, but the concern is urgent enough that Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has asked China and India to try to talk Russia down.When Russia conducted a series of secret military satellite launches around the time of its invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, American intelligence officials began delving into the mystery of what, exactly, the Russians were doing.Later, spy agencies discovered Russia was working on a new kind of space-based weapon that could threaten the thousands of satellites that keep the world connected.In recent weeks, a new warning has circulated from America’s spy agencies: Another launch may be in the works, and the question is whether Russia plans to use it to put a real nuclear weapon into space — a violation of a half-century-old treaty. The agencies are divided on the likelihood that President Vladimir V. Putin would go so far, but nonetheless the intelligence is an urgent concern to the Biden administration.Even if Russia does place a nuclear weapon in orbit, U.S. officials are in agreement in their assessment that the weapon would not be detonated. Instead, it would lurk as a time bomb in low orbit, a reminder from Mr. Putin that if he was pressed too hard with sanctions, or military opposition to his ambitions in Ukraine or beyond, he could destroy economies without targeting humans on earth.Despite the uncertainties, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken raised the possibility of the Russian nuclear move with his Chinese and Indian counterparts on Friday and Saturday on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference.Mr. Blinken’s message was blunt: Any nuclear detonation in space would take out not only American satellites but also those in Beijing and New Delhi.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is North Korea Planning a War?

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      An intensification of nuclear threats from North Korea while the world is preoccupied with other wars has ignited an urgent debate over Mr. Kim’s motives.North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells in waters near South Korean border islands on Jan. 5. Last week, it said it no longer regarded the South as inhabited by “fellow countrymen” but as a “hostile state” it would subjugate through a nuclear war. On Friday, it said it had tested an underwater nuclear drone to help repel U.S. Navy fleets.That new drumbeat of threats, while the United States and its allies have been preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has set foreign officials and analysts wondering whether the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, has moved beyond posturing and is planning to assert more military force.For decades, a central part of the North Korean playbook has been to stage carefully measured and timed military provocations — some aimed at tightening internal discipline, others at demanding attention from its neighbors and the United States, or all of that at once.But to several close watchers of North Korea, the latest round of signals from Mr. Kim feels different. Some are taking it as a clue that the North has become disillusioned with seeking diplomatic engagement with the West, and a few are raising the possibility that the country could be planning a sudden assault on South Korea.A New Year’s celebration in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, on Dec. 31, 2023.Kim Won Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesTwo veteran analysts of North Korea — the former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and the nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker — sounded an alarm this past week in an article for the U.S.-based website 38 North, asserting that Mr. Kim was done with mere threats. “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” they wrote.Analysts broadly agree that North Korea has been shifting its posture in recent years, compelled by an accumulation of both internal problems, including a moribund economy and food and oil shortages, and frustrations in its external diplomacy, like Mr. Kim’s failure to win an end to international sanctions through direct diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump. And most agree that the North’s recent closeness with Russia, including supplying artillery shells and missiles for use in Russia’s war in Ukraine, will be a game-changer in some way.But there is still stark disagreement over where Mr. Kim’s new tack might be leading.Many say that Mr. Kim’s ultimate goal remains not a war with South Korea, a treaty ally of the United States, but Washington’s acceptance of his country as a nuclear power by prompting arms-reduction talks.“The North Koreans won’t start a war unless they decide to become suicidal; they know too well that they cannot win the war,” said Park Won-gon, a North Korea expert at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But they would love their enemies to believe that they could, because that could lead to engagement and possible concessions, like the easing of sanctions.”Posters in Pyongyang remind citizens of North Korea’s need to remain on a war footing.Cha Song Ho/Associated PressAnalysts in China, North Korea’s most vital ally, were also deeply skeptical that Mr. Kim would go to war unless the North were attacked. Prof. Shi Yinhong, at Renmin University in Beijing, asserted that the North’s leadership, not being irrational, ultimately acted out of self-preservation — and that starting a war would work against that goal.Others noted that the North could assert itself militarily, including through smaller conventional strikes and bolder weapons testing, without necessarily triggering a deadly response.“There are many rungs of the escalation ladder that North Korea can climb short of all-out war,” said Victor Cha, a Korea expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Kim is not that confident in his capabilities to deter U.S. reaction if he were to do something rash.”If Mr. Kim wants to climb that ladder, recent history suggests that this might be the time.North Korea has liked to unsettle its enemies at their most sensitive political moments, and both the United States and South Korea are holding elections this year. The North launched a long-range rocket in late 2012, between the United States and South Korean presidential elections. It conducted a nuclear test shortly before the inauguration of a South Korean leader in 2013. In 2016, it conducted another nuclear test two months before the American presidential election.North Korea could also attempt provocations in the coming weeks to try to help liberals who favor inter-Korean negotiations win parliamentary elections in South Korea in April, said the analyst Ko Jae-hong at the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy. Through provocations, North Korea hopes to spread fears among South Korean voters that increasing pressure on the North, as the current administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol has tried to do, might “lead to a nuclear war,” he said.South Korean military exercises this month near the border with North Korea.Ahn Young-Joon/Associated PressNorth Korea “will continue to increase tensions until after the U.S. elections,” said Thomas Schäfer, a former German diplomat who served twice as ambassador to North Korea. But “at the height of tensions, it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and — as main objective — a reduction or even complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Schäfer said in a rebuttal to Mr. Carlin’s and Mr. Hecker’s analysis.Since Mr. Kim came to power in 2011, he has committed to building North Korea’s nuclear capability, using it both as a deterrent and as a negotiating tool to try to win concessions from Washington, like the removal of U.N. sanctions, to achieve economic growth.He tried it when he met Mr. Trump in 2018 and again in 2019. It failed spectacularly, and Mr. Kim returned home empty-handed and in humiliation.President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jung-un in 2019 in the Demilitarized Zone. In talks that year, the two failed to reach a deal on North Korea abandoning its nuclear ambitions in return for concessionsErin Schaff/The New York TimesHe then vowed to find a “new way” for his country.Since then, the North has rejected repeated calls from Washington for talks. It has also rejected South Korea as a dialogue partner, indicating from 2022 that it would use nuclear weapons against South Korea in a war and abandoning its long-held insistence that the weapons would keep the Korean Peninsula peaceful as a deterrent. It has tested more diverse, and harder-to-intercept, means of delivering its nuclear warheads.There is doubt that the North has yet built a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the United States. But two of the North’s main enemies, South Korea and Japan, are much closer.On the diplomatic front, Mr. Kim has taken pains to signal that he no longer views the United States as a critical negotiating partner, instead envisioning a “neo-Cold War” in which the United States is in retreat globally. He has aggressively improved military ties with Russia, and in return has most likely secured Russian promises of food aid and technological help for his weapons programs, officials say.South Korean troops patrol the entrance to a beach on an island near the sea boundary with North Korea.Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“I worry that his confidence might lead him to misjudge with a small act, regardless of his intention, escalating to war amid a tense ‘power-for-power’ confrontation with the United States and its allies,” said Koh Yu-hwan, a former head of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.Despite its own increasingly aggressive military posture in recent years, China may prove to be a damper on any North Korean military adventurism.China and North Korea are bound by a treaty signed in 1961 that requires each country to provide military assistance if the other is attacked. But China has little incentive to be drawn into a war in Korea right now.“A war on the Korean Peninsula would be disastrous for Beijing. An entire half-century of peace in East Asia, a period of unprecedented growth for the P.R.C., would come to a crashing halt,” said John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, referring to the People’s Republic of China.The United States has long leaned on Beijing to rein in North Korea. By drawing close to Moscow, Mr. Kim has been putting his own pressure on China’s leader, Xi Jinping.“It is notable that Kim made his first post-pandemic trip to the Russian Far East, skipping China, and he just sent his foreign minister to Moscow, not Beijing,” Mr. Delury said. By raising tensions, Mr. Kim “can see what Xi is willing to do to placate him,” he added.David Pierson More

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      North Korea Unveils New Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNorth Korea Unveils New Submarine-Launched Ballistic MissileDays before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration, the North made its latest demonstration of its nuclear might at a Pyongyang military parade. North Korean state media released this photo of missiles at a military parade in Pyongyang, the capital, on Thursday night.Credit…Korean Central News Agency, via Associated PressJan. 15, 2021, 7:01 a.m. ETSEOUL, South Korea — A month before the U.S. presidential election, North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, held a military parade that featured what appeared to be the country’s largest-ever intercontinental ballistic missile. This week, just days before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s inauguration, the North Korean dictator held another parade, showing off a new submarine-launched ballistic missile.To the Kim regime, the nighttime military parades in Pyongyang, the capital, were demonstrations of power meant to boost domestic morale amid crippling economic sanctions. To the Biden administration, they foreshadow what could become the incoming president’s greatest foreign policy challenge.The timing of the two flashy exhibitions has drawn attention to the diplomatic freeze between the two countries. In North Korea, Mr. Biden is inheriting a rival whose nuclear ambition is bolder and more dangerous than it was four years ago, when President Barack Obama left office.The parades underscored that North Korea has been silently ramping up its nuclear capability for years, even as President Trump claimed that his top-down, personality-driven diplomacy with Mr. Kim meant the North was “no longer a nuclear threat.”“If anything, the North’s nuclear threat has only grown,” said Yun Duk-min, a former chancellor of the Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul. “The military parade is evidence.”This week’s parade came at the end of the eight-day congress held by North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, which was closely monitored by outside analysts for clues to how Mr. Kim might recalibrate his policy toward Washington.Kim Jong-un, center, the North’s leader, recently promised to “further strengthen our nuclear deterrence.”Credit…Korean Central News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Kim used the congress to celebrate the North’s nuclear arsenal as one of ​his proudest achievements, and to apologize to his people for the deepening economic woes caused by the pandemic and the devastating international sanctions imposed since the country’s fourth nuclear test in 2016.Mr. Kim’s historic summits with Mr. Trump in Singapore and Vietnam failed to end those sanctions. With his back against the wall and diplomacy with the United States at a standstill, some experts warn that Mr. Kim may return to testing missiles to bring Washington back to the negotiating table with more attractive proposals.North Korea has a history of retreating deeper into isolation and raising tensions to strengthen its leverage when negotiations do not lead to concessions, or when a new American president takes office.“North Korea leaves little doubt about its intentions: It wanted to be treated as an equal in nuclear arms reduction talks with the United States,” said Cheon Seong-whun, a former director of the Korea Institute for National Unification, a think tank in Seoul. “The new weapons disclosed during two parades have never been tested before and we don’t know whether they are actually working,” Mr. Cheon said. “But we know in what direction North Korea is headed.” The earlier parade, held on Oct. 10 to mark a party anniversary, unveiled what appeared to be the largest intercontinental ballistic missile the North had ever built. It also featured a Pukguksong-4, a new version of a submarine-launched ballistic missile, or SLBM. Neither weapon has been tested.The SLBM displayed during the parade on Thursday look​ed like yet another upgraded, untested version of the one North Korea has been developing under Mr. Kim, along with its Hwasong land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.Another state media image from the parade on Thursday.Credit…Korean Central News Agency, via Associated PressNorth Korea tested three Hwasong ICBMs in 2017. After the last such test, it claimed that it could now target the continental United States with a nuclear warhead.Images of this week’s parade released through state media showed Mr. Kim proudly observing the neat columns of missiles, rockets, tanks and goose-stepping soldiers marching across the main plaza in Pyongyang, named after his grandfather, the North’s founder, Kim Il-sung.The parade also featured fireworks and military planes firing flares in the night sky as crowds of people danced at the plaza, state media reported on Friday.Kim Jong-un has vowed to strengthen the North’s nuclear deterrent ​since his talks with Mr. Trump stalled​ in 2019​. And as the economy continues to deteriorate, his bargaining opportunities are limited.“The armed forces of the Republic will strictly contain any military threats in the region of the Korean Peninsula and preemptively use the strongest offensive power to thoroughly smash the hostile forces if they jeopardize the security of our state even a bit,” Defense Minister Kim Jong-gwan of North Korea was quoted as saying during the parade. (He was referring to the North, whose formal name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.)At the party congress, Mr. Kim made it clear that the steep economic challenges facing the North would not affect his weapons program. He called his nuclear arsenal the greatest achievement “in the history of the Korean nation” and vowed to “further strengthen our nuclear deterrence.”Dancing in Pyongyang on Thursday.Credit…Korean Central News Agency, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe also offered an unusually detailed wish list of weapons, from “hypersonic gliding-flight warheads” and military reconnaissance satellites to “ultramodern tactical nuclear weapons,” which have become a growing concern for the United States and allies in the region, including South Korea and Japan.North Korea has seen its nuclear force as the best tool for ensuring the continuity of the Kim family’s dynastic rule, and as a bargaining chip to extract economic and other concessions from the United States. During the party congress, Mr. Kim claimed that his nuclear weapons had made North Korea safer from American threats, putting it in a better position to rebuild its economy.His hardening stance reflects “deep rage and disappointment” after his failed negotiations with Mr. Trump, said Lee Byong-chul, a North Korea expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in South Korea.The government of South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, helped to arrange the Trump-Kim summits, which were centered on cultivating personal trust between the two leaders with the hope of reaching a breakthrough. Mr. Trump wanted a nuclear-free peninsula, and Mr. Kim wanted an end to the sanctions. Their meetings went nowhere, though North Korea has since refrained from major provocations as it waited out the confusion of the American presidential election.The election is now over, but chaos has only deepened in the United States, and Mr. Kim’s patience may be running thin. “We can expect him to raise tensions depending on whether and how Biden responds,” said Mr. Lee.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Donald Trump Is Tipping the Nuclear Dominoes

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      If the Trump administration follows through on its threat to restart nuclear tests, it will complete the unraveling of more than 50 years of arms control agreements, taking the world back to the days when school children practiced “duck and cover” and people built backyard bomb shelters. It will certainly be the death knell for the Comprehensive […] More