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New North Korean Missile Could Have Better Accuracy, U.S. Official Says North Korea is developing a new long-range ballistic missile that has improved accuracy over its older designs, a U.S. official said yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 11). The new missile is believed to be based on a Soviet-era SS-N-6 sea-launched ballistic missile that North Korea is suspected of having acquired sometime between 1992 and 1998, the official said. Pyongyang then added technology to modify the missile, giving it the capability to be launched from land and improved accuracy, the official said. Based on the missile’s description, it “increases the probability that North Korea could achieve the capability of launching nuclear weapons against the continental U.S.,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. Because the North Korean missile is reportedly based on Soviet-era technology, Pyongyang could deploy it “without having to farm out the testing to their buddies in Pakistan and Iran” or “blow up a lot of hardware,” he said. “They’re going with something tried and true rather than trying to invent it themselves. They basically let (former Soviet leader Nikita) Khrushchev pay for all the exploding rockets 40 years ago,” Pike said. There is no indication that Russia was formally involved in the missile transfer or that Moscow has had any involvement in North Korea’s missile efforts “in at least the last five years,” the U.S. official said. “We’ve had hints of this for several years, but it’s only within the last year that we’ve been able to confirm that this did exist and it’s derived from Russian technology,” the official said (Sonni Efron, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 12).
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