North Korea fired several ballistic missiles toward its western waters around 1:50 p.m. KST on Monday, according to the South Korean military. It marked the North’s fifth missile launch this year and came on the same day the United States and South Korea kicked off their “Freedom Shield” annual joint military drills, one of the main combined exercises between the two allies.
According to the South Korean military, it detected the launch from North Hwanghae Province, west of Pyongyang. The South’s military believes the launch involved “close-range” ballistic missiles but has not shared more details on how far they flew. If the South Korean military’s analysis is accurate, the missiles flew less than 300 kilometers before falling into the ocean.
Although North Korea usually shares details of the performance of its tested missiles a day after the launch, North Korean state media has not made any reports on the event as of writing. However, Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, released a statement last week to belittle the joint military drills between South Korea and the United States and to reiterate Pyongyang’s view on the drills as a rehearsal for invasion.
“If the U.S. continues to renew its records in the anti-DPRK military demonstration, the DPRK will be naturally compelled to renew its records in the exercise of strategic deterrence,” Kim Yo Jong said in her statement last week. (DPRK is an abbreviation of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.) Her comments served as a tacit warning of the upcoming missile test.
The United States and South Korea condemned the North’s missile test as it is a clear violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.
“The United States condemns these actions and calls on the DPRK to refrain from further unlawful and destabilizing acts,” the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in its statement published on Monday. “While we have assessed that this event does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel, or territory, or to our allies, we continue to monitor the situation.”
The Freedom Shield exercise kicked off on Monday, March 10 and will run through March 20. The major drills are continuing as scheduled despite opposition from the residents in Pocheon, north of Seoul, who suffered an accidental bombing inflicted by two South Korean KF-16 fighter jets on their village on March 6.
Due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s interest in renewing the stalled nuclear talks with North Korea, Pyongyang has tried not to provoke Trump, avoiding its typical style of undiplomatic rhetoric when discussing him for the past few months. However, as Trump has praised himself for not accepting the deal at the negotiating table with Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in 2019, Kim will see little reason to restore the deadlocked dialogue with Trump unless Washington makes concessions by lifting some economic sanctions against his country first.
Given its strengthened relations with Russia following its explicit support for Moscow in the Ukraine War, North Korea has no reason to make any changes in the security environment in the region. Pyongyang has Russia’s diplomatic support, which includes vetoing any additional sanctions at the U.N. Security Council. North Korea has also reportedly received economic aid and military technology from Moscow in return for its supply of ammunition and deployment of soldiers to the battlefield.
North Korea has recently unveiled photos of its leader inspecting the construction site for nuclear-powered submarines, the first images of the sort. With that, Pyongyang clearly showed its determination to keep advancing its nuclear arsenal.
Kim will never give up his nuclear weapons as Trump demonstrated that U.S. security guarantees can be compromised through his poor gesture toward Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the two leaders met in the Oval Office on February 28. As many experts say that Russian President Vladimir Putin would have not been able to attack Ukraine if Kyiv had not given up its nuclear weapons, North Korea’s claim that its nuclear weapons are for self-defense will be repeated more by Pyongyang.
Should North Korea continuously beef up its ballistic missile programs at a time when Trump approaches the South Korea-U.S. alliance as a business transaction, more and more South Koreans will demand Seoul to develop indigenous nuclear weapons for self-defense. Considering Trump’s unconventional view on the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and his one-sided claim that Seoul does not pay enough for the U.S. defense commitment to South Korea, it is possible that Trump may allow Seoul to develop its nuclear weapons without penalizing it as long as Seoul accepts a deal that lessens the U.S. commitment to its defense, possibly including the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South’s soil.