North Korea put on a huge military spectacle Saturday to celebrate its founder’s birthday, parading its series of new and technologically advanced missiles in front of Kim Jong Un, and in a defiant show of force in front of the world.
North Korea did not, however, carry out another nuclear test or ballistic missile launch, against widespread speculation that it would seek to celebrate Kim Il Sung’s 105th birthday with a bang.
April 15 is the most important day in the North Korean calendar, and Kim Jong Un has celebrated his grandfather’s birthday with great fanfare as a way to boost his own legitimacy as the successor to the communist dynasty. North Korea presented two of its newest missiles at the parade in Kim Il Sung Square on Saturday, including the submarine-launched ballistic missile it successfully fired last year and the land-based version it launched last month.
“And there were a lot of them,” said Melissa Hanham, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California.”The signal that they’re trying to send is that they are moving ahead with solid-fuel missiles,” she said.
North Korea has been working on solid fuel, which means missiles are ready to fire and don’t need loading with propellant like its previous liquid-fuel missiles, as a way to fire missiles quickly and without detection by satellites.
It did not show off the KN-08 and KN-11 intercontinental ballistic missiles it had included in previous parades, the long-range rockets with the technical ability to reach the mainland United States that it is developing. But it instead put fuel canisters on the trucks that had carried the ICBMs previously, suggesting they wanted to reinforce the message that it can not fuel these longer-range missiles.
The parade took place amid stern warnings from the outside world, and mounting fears about some kind of military action in the region.
