2 More Launches Tonight Push North Korea Missile Tests To Record High In 2022
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and Japan Coast Guard report that North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles towards the sea off the east coast of the Korean peninsula this evening.
The two missiles launched Thurs. fell outside Japan’s EEZ, NHK reports citing an unidentified government official.
This launch comes just two days after they fired a longer-range missile over Japan.
As Statista's infographic shows below, North Korean missile tests have intensified in 2022 and were already at a record high by June. As the data from the Nuclear Threat Initiative shows, posturing from North Korea has been on the rise again after a test-less 2018. In 2018 and early 2019, two summits between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and U.S. President Trump brought tests to a halt, but eventually rendered no concrete results as rhetoric between the two nations grew heated again quickly.
2019 ended up seeing as many missile tests as 2017, when North Korea's demonstration of its ability to reach the U.S. with its missiles led to a diplomatic crisis.
Intercontinental or even intermediate missile tests were not witnessed from 2018 to 2021, but there has already been one successful test of each this year so far.
As CNN reports, the latest North Korean launch comes hours after a Security Council meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York about its nuclear ambitions.
During the meeting, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia and China of enabling it without naming them.
North Korea has “enjoyed blanket protection from two members of this council. These two members have gone out of their way to justify the DPRK’s repeated provocations and block every attempt to update the sanctions regime,” she said.
“North Korea is going to keep conducting missile tests until the current round of modernization is done,” Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, told CNN earlier this week.
A nuclear test could come “anytime,” he added.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/2-more-launches-tonight-push-north-korea-missile-tests-record-high-2022