North Korea tests missiles ahead of U.S. election, says American actions warrant its nuclear weapons buildup

Seoul — North Korea fired a salvo of short-range ballistic missiles early Tuesday, Seoul’s military said. It was Pyongyang’s second launch in days and it came just hours before Americans were set to vote for a new president.

The nuclear-armed North last week test-fired what it said was its most advanced and powerful solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). That was Kim Jong Un’s first weapons test since he was accused by U.S. and Ukrainian officials of sending soldiers to help support Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

North Korea, which has denied the deployment, is under growing international pressure to withdraw its troops from Russia, with Seoul warning Tuesday that thousands of soldiers were being deployed to front-line areas, including the Russian region of Kursk, which Ukrainian troops pushed into months ago.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected the launch of “several short-range ballistic missiles” at around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday (5:30 p.m. Eastern, Monday) into waters east of the Korean peninsula. The missiles flew approximately 248 miles and Seoul’s military said it had tracked the launch in real time while sharing information with Tokyo and Washington.

“In preparation for additional launches, our military has strengthened surveillance and alertness,” it added. Seoul was set to get more U.S. help in monitoring the North’s missile launches, meanwhile, with the State Department in Washington announcing Monday the approval of a new military aid package worth almost $5 billion. 

That package includes the potential sale of airborne early warning and control systems to South Korea, with the approval of four E-7 Airborne Early Warning & Control (AEW&C) aircraft, 10 jet engines, and other systems and support elements, at an estimated total cost of $4.92 billion.

The early warning and control aircraft, known as Wedgetails, would enable South Korea to detect missiles and other threats more swiftly and from greater distances than ground-based radar systems.

“This proposed sale will improve the Republic of Korea’s ability to meet current and future threats by providing increased intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and airborne early warning and control capabilities,” the State Department said. “It will also increase the ROK Air Force’s command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) interoperability with the United States.”

On Sunday, South Korea, Japan and the United States conducted a joint air drill involving a U.S. B-1B bomber, South Korean F-15K and KF-16 fighter jets, and Japanese F-2 jets, in response to the ICBM launch. Such joint drills infuriate Pyongyang, which views them as rehearsals for invasion.

Pyongyang called its latest launch “a direct response to the trilateral aerial exercises over the weekend,” Han Kwon-hee of the Korea Association of Defense Industry Studies told AFP. “Given it was a salvo of short-range missiles, the North is indicating that it not only has long-range missiles capable of reaching the U.S., but also short-range ones to target all bases in South Korea and Japan.”

Kim Yo Jong, sister of the country’s leader and a key spokesperson, called the U.S.-South Korea-Japan exercises an “action-based explanation of the most hostile and dangerous aggressive nature of the enemy toward our Republic.”

In a statement carried Tuesday by the official Korean Central News Agency, she said the drill was “absolute proof of the validity and urgency of the line of building up the nuclear forces we have opted for and put into practice.”

Seoul has long accused the nuclear-armed North of sending weapons to help Moscow fight Kyiv and alleged that Pyongyang has moved to deploy soldiers en masse since Kim signed a mutual defense deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in June.

“More than 10,000 North Korean soldiers are currently in Russia, and we assess that a significant portion of them are deployed to front-line areas, including Kursk,” Jeon Ha-gyu, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry, said Tuesday.

Seoul, a major weapons exporter, has said it is reviewing whether to send weapons directly to Ukraine in response, something it has previously resisted due to longstanding domestic policy that prevents it from providing weaponry into active conflicts.

With its recent testing spate, “Pyongyang is showing that its contribution of weapons and troops to Russia’s war in Ukraine does not curtail its military activities closer to home,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. “On the contrary, cooperation with Moscow appears to enable blatant violations of U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

On Monday, Robert Wood, U.S. deputy ambassador to the U.N., slammed the North’s advancing ballistic missile program and said Russia and China were preventing the U.N. from holding Pyongyang to account.

Beijing and Moscow “have repeatedly shielded the DPRK, contributing to the normalization of these tests and emboldening the DPRK to further violate this Council’s sanctions and resolutions,” he said, referring to the North by its official name.

Speaking Tuesday in Moscow, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko said the North’s missile tests were a justified reaction to U.S. “provocations,” according to Russia’s state-run TASS news agency.