North Korea Announces Successful Test of Two Long-Range Cruise Missiles

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) announced on Thursday it had carried out two more missile tests, its latest in a slew of such tests in previous weeks.

According to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the test involved two long-range cruise missiles that flew for "10,234 seconds [170.6 minutes] along an oval and pattern-8 flight orbits in the sky above the West Sea of Korea and clearly hit the target 2,000 km away.”

It added that the tests were done to enhance the "combat efficiency and might" of the country’s missile program.

“Expressing great satisfaction over the result of the test-fire, the respected [DPRK leader] Comrade Kim Jong Un highly appreciated the high reaction capabilities of our nuclear combat forces which proved again their full preparedness for actual war to bring the enemies under their control at a blow through the unconditional, mobile, precise and powerful counterstrike by any weapon system,” the KCNA report said.

Pyongyang has carried out seven other rounds of missile tests in the last two weeks, most of which involved ballistic missiles. The socialist state said it was going through a series of nuclear alert drills in response to joint drills by the United States and South Korea that rehearsed an armed confrontation with the DPRK.

North Korea has been at war with South Korea and the US since 1950, when Washington inserted itself into a civil war between a US-backed government in the south and a rival Soviet-backed one in the north. That war saw much of both Koreas destroyed and more than two million Koreans killed, but only ended in a ceasefire and not a permanent peace treaty. A demilitarized zone separates the two Koreas, and 28,000 US troops have garrisoned the South against potential DPRK attack.

The US has protested that the DPRK’s missile tests are provocative and destabilizing, as are its entire ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programs. Pyongyang says it needs such weapons to guarantee its safety from US attack in the absence of a permanent peace on the Korean peninsula.

Unlike ballistic missiles, the United Nations has not sanctioned the DPRK for developing cruise missiles.