North Korea tried to deceive the world about the type of missile it fired last week, claiming that it successfully tested a ¡°huge,¡± new ICBM while actually firing off a rocket first launched in 2017, South Korean defense officials said.
The intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea launched last week was likely a Hwasong-15, which was successfully tested in November 2017 and designed to carry a single nuclear warhead, the South Korean defense ministry told lawmakers in a report Tuesday. That¡¯s less advanced than the Hwasong-17, a multiple-warhead missile, which Pyongyang triumphantly declared a success with a slick, highly produced video.
South Korean officials said the shadows in the video of the Hwasong-17 launch fell in a direction indicating the footage was shot between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., rather than Thursday afternoon, when and ICBM rocketed into space and fell in the sea off of Japan. The cloud cover shown in the video also didn¡¯t match the weather on the day of the launch, the officials said.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.