North Korean officials have offered an explanation for Thursday's launch of a newly-developed intercontinental ballistic missile: to "radically promote" its nuclear counterattack capability and "strike extreme uneasiness and horror" in its adversaries -- including the United States.
The test deployment was a first of its kind for the country's solid-fueled missile known as Hwasong-18, capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads, which can be launched quicker and harder to detect that missiles propelled by liquid fuel.
"It's just going to be much, much harder for the United States to ultimately find and destroy these missiles in a conflict," Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea's nuclear program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told NPR. "That gives North Korea a much better deterrence."
The missile, which landed in the ocean near the Japanese island of Hokkaido, is "designed to serve as a key element of the country's strategic nuclear deterrent against potential invasion of enemy forces," according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
In a statement, KCNA quoted leader Kim Jong Un, who attended the launch, as saying the missile would make the enemy of North Korea "experience a clearer security crisis, and constantly strike extreme uneasiness and horror into them by taking fatal and offensive counter-actions until they abandon their senseless thinking and reckless acts, thus making them feel regret and despair for their wrong choice by surely exposing them to an irresistible threat."
While Thursday's test did not demonstrate the weapon's full capabilities and range, North Korea officials said it represented the country's "reliable nuclear war deterrence."
"The aim of the test-fire was to confirm the performance of the high-thrust solid-fuel engines for multi-stage missiles and the reliability of the stage-jettisoning technology and various functional control systems and to estimate the military feasibility of the new strategic weapon system," KCNA said. "The test-fire confirmed that all the parameters of the new strategic weapon system fully met the requirements of the design in terms of accuracy."
As opposed to liquid-fueled missiles, which require a convoy of fuel trucks and can take hours to refuel at the launch site, solid-fueled missiles are fueled when assembled at the factory and can be launched in as little as 10 minutes, Lewis told NPR.
Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Associated Press the test marked a "significant breakthrough for the North Koreans" in building an arsenal that could directly threaten the U.S.
"Because these missiles are fueled at the time of manufacture and are thus ready to use as needed, they will be much more rapidly useable in a crisis or conflict, depriving South Korea and the United States of valuable time that could be useful to preemptively hunt and destroy such missiles," Panda said.
Thursday's missile test was North Korea's 12th launch of the year, according to CNN.
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