The missile threat the world needs to worry about is not from North Korea, but Russia and Japan

So much has been said and written about North Korea’s missile tests that it’s possible to forget they are hardly the most dangerous threats posed by flying projectiles.

That’s not to minimise their importance, or to agree with the assessment of US President Donald Trump, who last Friday downplayed Pyongyang’s recent missile tests as “short-range”, not in violation of anything, and praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for apologising for the tests in another beautiful letter. Hours later, Pyongyang carried out another set of tests.

There are two points here. First, we have a lot more to fear from Russia’s burgeoning missile ambitions, and China’s too, than from North Korea’s. Second, North Korea is basically throwing its direly needed resources away on nukes and missiles, whatever the range, when Kim is nowhere close to having warheads affixed and fired for real.

Significantly, the Russian danger has increased with Trump’s decision to jettison the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The agreement, which banned Russia and the US from making land-based missiles with ranges from 500km to 5,500km, was reached by US president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 31 years ago.

Trump’s advisers, notably John Bolton, convinced him the Russians had been violating the treaty all along, making new missiles while making a show of dismantling old ones, while the Chinese, not bound by any treaty, were making many more.

With the INF relegated to the trash heap of history this month, everyone’s going to be making more missiles than ever. The US is looking around for bases in Asia to field missiles, while Russia is adding to the bases it has between the Russian Far East – which is so close to Alaska – and its border with the eastern European countries which used to be satellites of the Soviet Union until it collapsed soon after the INF took effect.

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Fledgling US Defence Secretary Mark Esper must have raised the topic of mini-bases for missiles during his recent talks with South Korea, Japan and Mongolia too. He gave away little in public about the US’ post-INF needs, however, while bracing the US alliance with Japan and South Korea, urging trilateral cooperation even as Tokyo and Seoul blast each other in a dispute that Washington hates and Pyongyang loves.

The reason for Esper’s reticence about planting more US missiles in the region is that he knows the last thing anyone wants in this corner of the world is to antagonise the leaders of China and Russia with an enhanced missile shield.

China punished South Korea for letting the US deploy the antimissile system known as THAAD, for Terminal High Altitude Area Defence, south of Seoul in 2016. For a year, South Korean firms suffered an informal Chinese boycott and Beijing held back droves of the free-spending tourists that once flooded duty-free shops in South Korea.

As for Russian President Vladimir Putin, he said this month Russia would have to rev up its missile production if the US was making more of them, too.

A new Russian missile programme might have come to light when an explosion last week ripped apart a small nuclear reactor at a cruise missile test site off Russia’s northern coast. Five scientists and two others were killed while radiation levels spiked in the area.

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Despite the setback, Russia is sure to go ahead and make those missiles. The Russians have also said they are working on a submarine capable of carrying an unmanned underwater nuclear drone.

Others are getting in on the act. Japan reportedly has a supersonic glide bomb, which can be launched from a safe distance. The rationale for the device is the defence of distant territories, including the small islands off the northern prefecture of Hokkaido that are held by Russia and claimed by Japan, and the disputed islands in the East China Sea that are known as the Senkakus in Japan and the Diaoyus in China.

The Japanese, of course, already have Aegis missiles on destroyers and Patriot missiles on land, to intercept North Korean missiles, and they are acquiring cruise missiles capable of first strikes against North Korean targets.

All of which means that Kim’s missile tests, while grabbing headlines, are hardly the most frightening threat. If Kim was so foolhardy as to launch a weaponised missile, Japan’s hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would have no better excuse for revising his country’s pacifist constitution, dating from the US occupation. As for Trump, he would have trouble convincing the Pentagon that Kim still loved him.

Donald Kirk is the author of three books and numerous articles on Korea