North Korea fires first ballistic missile of the year Sunday

The latest missile launch came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his regime should recalibrate its approach to South Korea, which he said should be considered the North’s “main enemy,” not “a partner in unification and reconciliation.”

In this footage released by Pyongyang's state-controlled Korean Central Television on Dec. 19, a North Korean Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile is launched from an unspecified location toward the East Sea the previous day. [YONHAP]

North Korea fired its first ballistic missile of the year toward the East Sea on Sunday, South Korean military authorities said.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the launch on Sunday afternoon and that it believes the missile in question was an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM).

The last missile fired by the North was a Hwasong-18 solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which landed in the East Sea on Dec. 18.

The latest missile launch came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his regime should recalibrate its approach to South Korea, which he said should be considered the North’s “main enemy,” not “a partner in unification and reconciliation.”

The North on Saturday appeared to have halted transmissions from Pyongyang Radio, a radio station previously used to send encrypted messages to its spies in the South.

Pyongyang Radio is best known for broadcasting mysterious numbers, which are believed to be coded directives to its agents in the South.

The North resumed the cryptic broadcasts in 2016 after a 16-year suspension.

Pyongyang’s state media reported on Saturday that the regime also decided at a meeting held the previous day to disband organizations in charge of civilian exchanges with the South.

According to the state-controlled Korean Central News Agency, participants at the meeting also called for a new inter-Korean approach that pursues the “complete elimination” of “South Korean puppets,” whom it described as seeking the collapse of the North Korean regime and its unification by absorption into the South.

State media also reported that North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui led discussions earlier this month to dismantle the United Front Department in charge of relations with the South.

North Korea has ramped up acts seen as provocative by the South since Kim characterized ties between the two Koreas as relations “between two states hostile to each other” and called for preparations to “take over the whole territory of South Korea” at a key meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party held at the end of last month.

During a two-day inspection of major munitions factories from Jan. 8 to 9, Kim also said his regime does “not have any intent to avoid war” with the South should it “conspire to use armed force” against the North, warning it “will not hesitate to annihilate” the South using “all means and forces available” in the event of an armed conflict.

The previous weekend, the North fired hundreds of artillery shells from its western coast into the Yellow Sea near the Northern Limit Line (NLL), which serves as the de facto inter-Korean maritime border.

In response, the South Korean military said on Jan. 8 it will restart live artillery exercises and drills near the border, adding the North’s recent exercise had effectively scrapped the buffer zone where such drills were banned.

Under the 2018 inter-Korean military agreement, all provocative actions, including firing coastal guns and conducting naval exercises, were prohibited in a buffer zone that extended 85 kilometers (52.8 miles) south and 50 kilometers north of the NLL, as well as a separate 80-kilometer-wide zone in the East Sea.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]