Kim Jong Un Oversees ICBM Launch in Show of Force Toward U.S.

SEOUL—North Korean leader Kim Jong Un oversaw the launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile on Wednesday, vowing the country wouldn’t halt its nuclear-weapon advances until the U.S. and South Korea “admit their shameful defeat.”

Pyongyang’s fleet of ICBMs, based on prior launches, have already demonstrated a potential range long enough to reach the U.S. mainland.

The ICBM launch was intended to serve as a “strong practical warning” to show Washington and its allies Pyongyang’s “unwavering will to overwhelmingly counter them,” the North’s state media said.

Kim, along with a series of senior officials and North Korean state-media missives, has significantly increased public criticism of the U.S. in recent days. Pyongyang has railed against the Biden administration’s decision to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, plans to send a U.S. nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea and legal reconnaissance flights around the Korean Peninsula that the North claims were unlawful intrusions.

At the Wednesday launch, Kim, the 39-year-old dictator, promised North Korea would pursue stronger military offensives unless Washington and Seoul shift their policy against the isolated regime.

The missile fired was the Kim regime’s “Hwasong-18” ICBM, a next-generation weapons system that represents the core of North Korea’s national defense. The weapon had been first launched in April. The latest launch reconfirmed the missile system’s technical credibility and operational reliability, the North’s state media said.

To avoid launching the missile over Japan into the Pacific Ocean, North Korea sends its ICBMs on steep trajectories. The missile soared some 4,100 miles high and traveled 620 miles before splashing into the waters at a “preset area” between the Korean Peninsula and Japan, Pyongyang’s state media said. It stayed airborne for around 74 minutes. On Wednesday, South Korean and Japanese officials offered similar assessments.

Kim wore a white suit for the Wednesday morning missile test that occurred in the Pyongyang area. The ICBM launch “shook the whole planet, and a huge body soared into the sky, blowing off a shower of fire,” state media said.

Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea expert at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, said North Korea could be winding up for an even grander type of weapons test, such as exploding a nuclear warhead over the Pacific Ocean. Pyongyang has floated the possibility of engaging in such a test before.

“North Korea excels in pretextual provocations, that is, resorting to illegal and menacing behavior while blaming the U.S. or South Korean actions or statements as the pretext for its kinetic ‘protest,’” Lee said. “Pyongyang is gearing up for a major provocation.”

The latest North Korean missile launch came as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army Gen. Mark Milley met with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts at U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s headquarters at Camp Smith, Hawaii, on Tuesday. Milley will next travel to Tokyo, then Seoul this week.

“This is a brazen violation of multiple unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions,” said Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for Milley, referring to the launch. The U.S. and its allies are “working through multiple bilateral and trilateral response options,” according to a senior military official.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol discussed North Korea’s missile threat in a meeting with NATO Secretary-General

Yoon presided over an emergency National Security Council meeting from Lithuania, South Korea’s presidential office said. The South Korean leader met with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Wednesday, where the two discussed the North’s latest launch.

The Kim Jong Un regime has conducted roughly a dozen weapons tests this year, including a botched spy-satellite launch and tests of an ICBM and what it claimed to be underwater cruise missiles. North Korea’s most-recent ballistic-missile test occurred June 15.

The April launch of an ICBM used a solid-fuel engine, which can potentially allow North Korea to deploy the weapon more quickly and with more stealth, missile experts say. That test featured what North Korea referred to as a next-generation ICBM called Hwasong-18. Kim, along with his daughter Kim Ju Ae, attended the launch.

North Korea’s prior ICBM launches had featured flight times stretching past an hour. To avoid having the test missile splash into foreign territory, the Kim regime sends the projectile on lofted trajectories, covering thousands of miles before splashing into the waters between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

In recent years, North Korea has conducted a historic number of weapons tests. United Nations Security Council resolutions bar Pyongyang from such behavior. But the Kim regime enjoys a degree of protection from additional punitive measures because of veto powers held at the U.N. Security Council by close allies Russia and China. North Korea has sought to tighten bonds with both countries over the past year.

Pyongyang has shown no interest in returning to disarmament talks, despite the Biden administration’s repeated offers to do so without preconditions. Without a deal with the U.S., North Korea will remain hit by international sanctions that cut off its access to the global financial system and choke its economy.

North Koreans are enduring one of the country’s worst food crises in decades, with widespread hunger and deaths from starvation.

—Gordon Lubold and Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.

Write to Timothy W. Martin at [email protected]