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WASHINGTON: North Korea fired two short-range missiles at the weekend but Washington played down the first such tests under President Joe Biden and said it was still open to dialogue with Pyongyang.
The North Korean activity involved weapons systems at the low end of the spectrum that were not covered by UN Security Council testing bans, two senior officials of the Biden administration told reporters in a briefing call on Tuesday.
South Korea’s military said two cruise missiles were fired off North Korea’s west coast on Sunday. Seoul had detected signs a test was imminent and was monitoring it in real time, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) told reporters,
The JCS reports tests of advanced North Korean weapons such as nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles nearly in real time but not tests of lower grade, shorter range weapons.
The launch marks North Korea’s first publicly known weapons test since Biden took office in January. The Biden downplayed the latest activity, saying “nothing much has changed.”
“No, according to the Defense Department it’s business as usual. There’s no new wrinkle in what they did,” he told reporters upon his return from a visit to Ohio, when asked if the test was a provocation.
The test came after North Korea refused to engage with repeated behind-the-scenes US diplomatic overtures by the new administration since mid-February.
A top US general last week had warned of the near-term possibility of a far more provocative move: a decision by North Korea to begin flight testing an improved design for its inter-continental ballistic missiles. Such a move would sharply increase tension between the United States and North Korea.
Joint US-South Korean military exercises this month angered North Korea even though they were scaled back this year to become computer-simulated drills.
North Korea has maintained and developed its nuclear and ballistic missile programs throughout 2020 in violation of international sanctions, helping fund them with some $300 million stolen through cyber hacks, according to independent UN sanctions monitors. Pyongyang has been subject to UN sanctions since 2006 aimed at cutting off funding for its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
The weekend missile tests came just before a North Korean businessman accused by the United States of laundering money to circumvent US and UN sanctions intended to curb his country’s nuclear weapons program appeared in a U.S. court on Monday after extradition from Malaysia.
North Korea has not tested a nuclear weapon or an ICBM since 2017, but conducted repeated tests of shorter-ranges missiles after the Hanoi summit broke down. The Trump administration also sought to play down such tests.
