North Korea tried to deceive the world about the type of missile it fired last week, claiming that it successfully tested a "huge,” new ICBM while actually firing off a rocket first launched in 2017, South Korean defense officials said.
The intercontinental ballistic missile that North Korea launched last week was likely a Hwasong-15, which was successfully tested in November 2017 and designed to carry a single nuclear warhead, the South Korean defense ministry told lawmakers in a report Tuesday. That’s less advanced than the Hwasong-17, a multiple-warhead missile, which Pyongyang triumphantly declared a success with a slick, highly produced video.
South Korean officials said the shadows in the video of the Hwasong-17 launch fell in a direction indicating the footage was shot between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., rather than Thursday afternoon, when and ICBM rocketed into space and fell in the sea off of Japan. The cloud cover shown in the video also didn’t match the weather on the day of the launch, the officials said.
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