The New York Times : North Korean Missile Launch Fails, and Show of Strength Fizzles

North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday morning from near its submarine base in Sinpo on its east coast, but the launch was the latest in a series of failures just after liftoff, according to American and South Korean military officials.
The timing was a deep embarrassment for the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, because the missile appeared to have been launched to show off his daring as a fleet of American warships approached his country to deter provocations.
Over the past three years, a covert war over the missile program has broken out between North Korea and the United States. As the North’s skills grew, President Barack Obama ordered a surge in strikes against the missile launches, The New York Times reported last month, including through electronic-warfare techniques. It is unclear how successful the program has been, because it is almost impossible to tell whether any individual launch failed because of sabotage, faulty engineering or bad luck. But the North’s launch-failure rate has been extraordinarily high since Obama first accelerated the program.
In an unusually worded statement that left hanging the question of whether the United States played any role in the latest launch’s failure, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said: "The president and his military team are aware of North Korea’s most recent unsuccessful missile launch. The president has no further comment." Hours before the unsuccessful test, three types of intercontinental ballistic missiles rolled through Pyongyang, the North’s capital, in an annual parade as the country tried to demonstrate that its military reach was expanding at a time of heightened tensions with the United States.
During the parade in Pyongyang, Kim watched from a platform surrounded by elderly military officers as long columns of goose-stepping soldiers marched through a large plaza, accompanied by tanks, missiles and rocket tubes.
Saturday was the 105th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the country’s founder, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather and the man the younger Kim tries to emulate, in looks and action. Kim Il-sung’s birthday, called the Day of the Sun, is the North’s most important holiday and a key moment for scoring propaganda points.
The United States, China and other regional powers had feared that North Korea might mark the occasion by conducting its sixth nuclear test or by launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The United States sent a naval strike group to the coast of the Korean Peninsula in a show of force that has become a first, wary showdown between Kim and Trump.
But no seismic tremor emanated on Saturday morning from the North’s nuclear test site, where recent satellite photographs have shown what appeared to be preparations for an underground detonation.
While the North has repeatedly claimed that it can strike the United States with a nuclear warhead, it has never flight-tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of crossing the Pacific. With the kind of fanfare that only a totalitarian state can muster, North Korea on Saturday flaunted missiles that can theoretically reach the United States and defiantly stated that it was prepared to counter any U.S. attack with "a nuclear war of our own." But it soon looked like a case of style over substance. North Korea somewhat ruined the impression created with the parade, which took place on the most important day of the year for Kim Jong Un’s regime, with a failed missile launch Sunday morning. 
The ballistic missile was fired from the Sinpo area on the east coast shortly before 6 a.m. local time, U.S. Pacific Command said. It blew up almost immediately, complicating efforts to identify the missile’s size and range. 
North Korea fired a land-based version of its medium-range, submarine-launched ballistic missile from the same area earlier this month. That exercise also failed. The missile was fired as Vice President Mike Pence took off from Alaska on his way to Seoul, where he is expected to issue a strong warning to North Korea to stop its provocative behavior or face consequences, reported the Washington Post. 
"We weren't surprised by it, we were anticipating it," a White House foreign policy adviser told reporters traveling with Pence. "It wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when. The good news is that after five seconds it fizzled out." As a result, the U.S. doesn’t need "to expend any resources against that," he said.
The missile was launched into the sea off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula, where a U.S. Navy strike group is patrolling. Military commanders ordered the group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, to the area this month as tensions with North Korea mounted. 
The group has the ability to shoot down incoming missiles and launch missiles of its own. 
Although the missile in Sunday’s attempt like others before it exploded shortly after launch, experts warn that North Korea’s rocket scientists learn something from failures as well as successes, giving them information they can use to hone their technology. Certainly, the military hardware paraded through Pyongyang on Saturday shows that Kim is unrelenting in his quest to develop a missile capable of reaching the United States. 
Experts were stunned at the sheer number of new missiles on display during the parade including, apparently, a new and previously unknown type of intercontinental ballistic missile. "It’s not like not doing a nuclear test was good news this is all part of the same program," said Jeffrey Lewis, head of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. North Korea has claimed to be able to make nuclear weapons small enough to be able to fit on a missile. 
"It’s like they’re saying: ‘Hey, here’s some other bad news,’ " Lewis said.

Source: QNA