Even though the North's Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile flew 400 kilometers in the sixth test attempt, the launch is no more than a partial success, a top U.S. missile expert said Wednesday.
John Schilling, an aerospace engineer and consultant to the U.S.-Korea Institute's "38 North" website, gave the assessment to Yonhap News Agency, saying the flight distance is still well short of the missile's maximum range and the sixth test came shortly after a fifth test failed.
"They will very likely claim this test as a success but having flown only about a tenth of the Musudan's expected maximum range would make it hard to credit it as more than partially successful," Schilling said in an email to Yonhap.
The North could have deliberately aimed short, but that might "reflect lack of confidence as much as it does sensitivity to Japanese concerns," the expert said. Had the North wanted to fly the missile longer, it could have used the Dongchang-ri or Sohae launching site in the country's west, instead of firing the missile from the east coast.
The western site "has a clear range as far south as the Philippines and has been used for their Unha space launches," he said, referring to a series of long-range rocket launches that the North has carried out, including one conducted in February.
"More importantly, the second test launch was conducted only hours after the first one reportedly broke up in flight. That's not nearly long enough to figure out what went wrong, much less fix it.
Even the month or so since the last test isn't really long enough for that," Schilling said. "So these can't be real tests in the engineering sense, where one is trying to find and fix problems so as to build a reliable system," he said. "This only makes sense as a desperate attempt to achieve, by luck if nothing else, something close enough to a success to be used for some propaganda purpose even as they have no way of knowing why one missile managed to fly as far as it did, while all the others failed completely."
The North will hold a meeting of its rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People's Assembly, one week from now, and Wednesday's launches could be lauded as a key achievement of leader Kim Jong-un following the North's fourth nuclear test in January and February's long-range rocket launch.
The North first test-launched the Musudan missile on April 15.
All but the last and sixth launch failed, with the missile exploding in midair or on a mobile launcher, or crashing seconds after launch.
The U.S. condemned the latest launches and said it will raise the issue at the U.N. Security Council.(Yonhap)