A fresh barrage of missile launches by North Korea on Tuesday marked the latest in a wave of provocations from Pyongyang, which set a monthly record for launches in March amid mounting uncertainty and unease over the impact the deadly coronavirus pandemic is having on the isolated nation.
Analysts fear North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may be lashing in the face of a mounting humanitarian crisis — in a country that have yet to admit a single COVID-19 case — or, conversely, Mr. Kim has actually staved off a virus outbreak and senses a window of opportunity against his weakened and distracted adversaries.
Despite COVID-19’s origins in neighboring China and its spread across Asia and the rest of the world, the Kim regime maintains there have zero cases recorded in North Korea — an assertion U.S. officials dispute and which makes the recent flurry of missiles tests even more difficult to interpret.
Tuesday’s tests featured weapons fired both from the ground and from fighter jets, according to South Korean military officials, who said at least some of projectiles were likely cruise missiles.
The ground-fired missiles flew more than 90 miles at low altitude off North Korea’s east coast. If confirmed, they would mark Pyongyang’s first cruise missile launch in about three years, according to one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official said North Korea separately launched several Sukhoi-class fighter jets later on Tuesday that fired an unspecified number of air-to-surface missiles, also toward waters off the country’s eastern shoreline.
The repeated short-range ballistic missile tests over recent months have come as denuclearization talks with Washington have remained stalled, and as the Trump administration has struggled to come up with a way forward for what had been one of President Trump’s signature foreign policy initiatives.
Mr. Trump has appeared eager to seize on the coronavirus pandemic as a tool to re-energize stalled communications and diplomacy with the Kim regime. In late March, administration officials revealed that the president had sent a letter to Mr. Kim seeking engagement in combating coronavirus.
The response from Pyongyang was mixed. North Korean state media ran a statement by Mr. Kim’s sister and senior ruling party official, Kim Yo Jong, who praised Mr. Trump for sending the letter, but suggested it ultimately fell on deaf ears.
“In my personal opinion, I think that the bilateral relations and dialogue…would be thinkable only when the equilibrium is kept dynamically and morally and justice ensured between the two countries,” Kim Yo Jong was quoted as saying. “Even at this moment we are working hard to develop and defend ourselves on our own under the cruel environment which the U.S. is keen to ’provide.’”
Such sentiment, coupled with the ongoing wave missile tests, has prompted wariness among regional analysts that the administration’s overture was off the mark — at a moment when the Kim regime is actually eager to expose the failure of Mr. Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions to reduce North Korea’s military capabilities.
“More ballistic tests by Pyongyang mean that it’s improving its technical capabilities,” Jessica Lee, a senior fellow focused on East Asia at Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said Tuesday on a videoconference hosted by the U.S. Institute of Peace.
“As the United States continues to sanction Pyongyang, North Korea is advancing its missile and nuclear technology, which is incidentally opposite of what our sanctions are supposed to achieve and greatly adding to an already volatile situation with the pandemic,” she said.
Ms. Lee noted that the latest missile tests were likely carried out by the Kim regime with the goal of provoking a reaction from South Korea, which was holding a legislative election on Tuesday. The launches also came a day before Wednesday’s birthday of North Korea’s founding leader Kim Il Sung — the grandfather of the country’s current dictator.
Outbreak or not?
North Korea has repeatedly said there hasn’t been a single case of the coronavirus on its soil. Some foreign experts question that claim, particularly since the North Korea depends on imports almost exclusively from China, the Kim regime’s top economic lifeline.
U.S. Army Gen. Robert Abrams, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, made headlines in early April when he said that North Korean officials have been lying about the lack of an outbreak.
“I can tell you that is an impossible claim based on all of the intel that we have seen,” Gen. Abrams told Voice of America and CNN in a joint interview.
North Korea’s military was “locked down” for about 30 days in February and early March, he said, adding that “they took draconian measures at their border crossings and inside their formations to do exactly what everybody else is doing, which is to stop the spread.”
While the measures may indicate that the virus was indeed present, some experts say the aggressive moves and Pyongyang’s near-total system of state control may well have staved off a major outbreak.
Kee Park, Harvard Medical School lecturer and head of the Korean American Medical Association’s North Korea program, noted Tuesday that Pyongyang wasted no time sealing its border with China back in January and that fewer than 250 cases of coronavirus have been identified in the Chinese provinces along the border.
“I believe it’s possible and perhaps probable that North Korea was successful in preventing the COVID-19 virus from entering its borders,” Mr. Park said on the USIP videoconference. “I think the North Koreans succeeded in flattening the curve, and I would say maybe completely squashed it.”
At the same time, Mr. Park warned, the prospect for an outbreak remains very real for North Korea and could be disastrous since there only an estimated 500 to 5,000 ICU hospital beds available in the entire country.
“Having worked in some of [the] top hospitals over the last 13 years in North Korea, my guess is towards the smaller estimate, and I would be very surprised if the total number of ventilators in the country exceeds 50,” he said. “So, in a worst-case scenario, … the total number of deaths in North Korea could exceed 150,000 people and they would need somewhere between 800,000 hospital beds and 200,000 ICU beds. It would totally exceed their capacity.”
However, Mr. Park added that such a scenario also requires aggressive mitigation measures imposed by regime — measures that would, in the case of a major outbreak, reduce the number of deaths to about 7,000 and cut the hospital bed demand down to a level “within the capacity of the North Korean health system.”
David Maxwell, a former U.S. Special Forces officer who also appeared on the USIP videoconference, said the reason there may not have been a major outbreak is likely because of the Kim regime’s “draconian population resources control measures and the inhumane security system that exists in North Korea.”
“We just don’t know what is happening,” said Mr. Maxwell, now a North Korea analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracy. He cited reports of some 200 North Korean soldiers and four military doctors who reportedly perished from coronavirus-like symptoms.
“Even though these are unconfirmed reports, we need to assess them and we need to take them seriously,” he said, adding that U.S. officials should brace for the possibility that an uncontrolled outbreak could occur in North Korea and bring with it a catastrophic humanitarian crisis.
“We [could] see refugees going to China, going to South Korea, even Japan by sea,” Mr. Maxwell said. “And of course, the other factor, within all this, is the massive amount of weapons of mass destruction inside North Korea, which poses a real threat to [South Korea] and to the region. And so, in the midst of instability and collapse, we face a very complex situation, one which we must be prepared for.”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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