North Korea to Deploy New Missile, U.S. Says

An exiting U.S. defense official warned Friday that North Korea could soon deploy an advanced short-range missile, the Associated Press reported (see GSN, June 28).

The new missile has greater agility and accuracy than the Scud missiles already in place behind North Korea’s borders, said Richard Lawless, the Defense Department’s lead Asia policy official for the last five years. He said the missile represents a new threat to South Korea, and that Pyongyang might try to sell the weapon on the international market.

North Korea successfully tested three of its short-range KN-02 missiles in June.  A version of the former Soviet Union’s SS-21 missile design, the KN-02 or Toksa missile has a range of 75 to 85 miles.

“As this system, this particular system, approaches operational status and is deployed in large numbers, you have for the first time in the North Korean inventory" a highly accurate missile “whose only purpose, given its range, is to strike [South Korea],” Lawless said.

The missiles are not designed as nuclear-capable weapons.  However, concerns persist that North Korea could develop a missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, Gen. Burwell Bell, the top U.S. commander in South Korea, said last week (Robert Burns, Associated Press/International Herald Tribune, July 6).

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