North Korea passed off old intercontinental ballistic missile as newer version, Seoul says

The South’s defence ministry said the ICBM that Pyongyang fired last week was likely a Hwasong-15, which was successfully tested in 2017

Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong said the North is preparing for a possible nuclear weapon for the first time in five years

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North Korea claimed it successfully launched the advanced Hwasong-17 ICBM on March 24. Photo: KCNA/dpa

Published: 10:03am, 30 Mar 2022Updated: 12:53pm, 30 Mar 2022

North Korea tried to deceive the world about the type of missile it fired last week, claiming that it successfully tested a “huge,” new ICBM while actually firing off a rocket first launched in 2017, South Korean defence officials said.

The intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea launched last week was likely a Hwasong-15, which was successfully tested in November 2017 and designed to carry a single nuclear warhead, the South Korean defence ministry told lawmakers in a report on Tuesday. That’s less advanced than the Hwasong-17, a multiple-warhead missile, which Pyongyang triumphantly declared a success with a slick, highly produced video.

South Korean officials said the shadows in the video of the Hwasong-17 launch fell in a direction indicating the footage was shot between 8am and 10am, rather than Thursday afternoon, when and ICBM rocketed into space and fell in the sea off of Japan.

The cloud cover shown in the video also didn’t match the weather on the day of the launch, the officials said. That suggests North Korea may have used video from a failed Hwasong-17 test on the morning of March 16 and launched an actual Hwasong-15 to sell it as a success, as previously reported by NK News.

The Kim Jong-un regime has long relied on weapons tests to bolster its image as a national protector, giving it an incentive to cover up missile that failed in an explosion that could be seen in the skies over Pyongyang.