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North Korea said on Monday that its latest missile launch was a mock attack on South Korea and the United States as the two countries held “dangerous war exercises,” while South Korea said it had recovered part of a North Korean missile off its coast.
North Korea test-fired multiple missiles, including a potentially failed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and hundreds of artillery shells into the sea last week as South Korea and the U.S. conducted a six-day air drill that began last week. Six ends.
North Korea’s military said the “Vigilance Storm” exercise was an “open provocation aimed at deliberately escalating tensions” and a “highly aggressive and dangerous war exercise.”
North Korea’s military says it has conducted mock attacks on air bases and planes, as well as major South Korean cities, to “crush the enemy’s ongoing war hysteria”
The flurry of missile launches included the largest single-day launch and came as nuclear-armed North Korea conducted a record-breaking year of missile tests.
South Korean and U.S. officials also said Pyongyang was technically ready to test a nuclear device, the first time it has done so since 2017.
Senior diplomats from the United States, Japan and South Korea spoke by phone on Sunday and condemned the latest tests, including the “reckless” firing of a missile that landed off the coast of South Korea last week, according to a State Department statement.
A South Korean vessel found debris believed to be part of North Korea’s short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), an official with South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said on Monday. This is the first time a North Korean ballistic missile has landed near South Korean waters.
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The South Korean navy rescue ship recovered the parts being analyzed using underwater probes, the official said.
North Korea’s military said it fired two “strategic” cruise missiles on Nov. 2 into the waters off South Korea’s Ulsan, a southeastern coastal city with a nuclear power plant and a large factory complex.
South Korean officials called the claims “untrue” and said they had not tracked the missiles nearby.
Analysts said some of the photos published by North Korean state media appear to have been recovered from a launch earlier this year.
The operations also included the launch of two “tactical ballistic missiles loaded with dispersed warheads,” testing “special function warheads that paralyze the enemy’s combat command system,” and a “full-scale combat sortie” involving 500 fighter jets, according to KCNA’s official news agency. statement.
Joseph Dempsey, a defense researcher at the Institute for International Studies, said the 500 fighter jets represented nearly every dedicated fighter jet in North Korea’s inventory, which seemed unlikely since many airframes were 40 to 80 years old. history, and not all are available or remain in the active fleet. Strategic Research.
“(The) 500 figure appears to be exaggerated, or at least misleading,” he said in a post on Twitter.
The North Korean People’s Army (KPA) General Staff accused Seoul and Washington of triggering a “more unstable confrontation” and vowed to respond to their exercises with “sustained, resolute and overwhelming practical military measures”.
“The more persistent the enemy’s provocative military actions, the more thoroughly and ruthlessly the KPA will counter them,” the statement said.
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