North Korea’s missile tests driving up risks

It seems perverse that a desperately poor nation, short on food and nearly all the modern essentials, binges on missile launches costing tens of millions of dollars. But this makes perfect sense to Mr Kim Jong Un who is marking his 11th year as North Korea’s leader. Each launch is meant to be an antidote against regime change and a supposed boost to national morale, and to his own image and power at a time when he has had to make unprecedented public apologies for the hardships being experienced by his people.

In the course of last week, North Korea rattled the region and shattered its own records as it racked up 85 missile launches in 2022. Last Wednesday alone, it launched 23 tests, the largest ever in a day. One missile landed close to South Korea’s territorial waters, the first such incident since the peninsula was divided in 1945, pushing President Yoon Suk-yeol to call it an “effective territorial encroachment”. In October, Pyongyang fired an intermediate-range missile over Japan which had to ask its citizens to take cover. To the Biden administration, North Korea made the point that it can hit the United States homeland, more than 5,000km away, with an intercontinental ballistic missile launch.

Last week’s series of launches, Pyongyang says, were a response to the largest joint US-South Korean military exercise ever staged, involving more than 240 aircraft. US and South Korean analysts say there are signs of an even graver provocation ahead. The North is assessed to be ready to conduct its first nuclear test since 2017, perhaps timed around the Nov 8 midterm elections in the US. If this happens, Washington and its allies have warned of an unparalleled scale of response that would include the “end” of the Kim regime.

Mr Kim, who has outlasted two US and three South Korean presidents, has ignored repeated offers by the Biden administration for talks. Two high-profile summits – in Singapore in 2018 and in Hanoi in 2019 between Mr Kim and then President Donald Trump – did not yield breakthroughs. It is thought that North Korea is now bent on demonstrating its military prowess to force the US to accept it as a nuclear power and ease international sanctions which limit the North’s access to global trade and finance.

These are essential if Mr Kim is to revive the precarious economy. But with more alignment between Washington and the new governments in Tokyo and Seoul, the opposite may occur. South Korea and Japan may press to acquire nuclear weapons to shield themselves against Pyongyang’s missiles. Washington, which had based nuclear weapons in South Korea in 1958 but withdrew them in 1991, could redeploy them. The move will rile China and Russia, and ripples will be inevitably felt across Asia. Mr Kim’s missiles could backfire.