North Korea again moved to belittle the South Korean military's successful test launch of a hypersonic glide vehicle, or HGV, while using the exchange to justify its own buildup of nuclear and missile forces. Military experts say Pyongyang is displaying considerable wariness and unease about the South's acquisition of hypersonic strike assets.
According to the North's official Korean Central News Agency on the 16th, Kim Jong-sik, first vice department director of the Workers' Party Central Committee, issued a statement that night dismissing the South Korean military's HGV capabilities. "The part the South Korean Defense Ministry rebutted as a matter of 'technology' is a shameful absurdity that no country's technical community could accept," he said.
A day earlier, Jang Chang-ha, head of the North's Missile Administration, had raised doubts that the South failed to achieve hypersonic flight, pointing to photographs of the HGV test launch released by the South Korean government on the 8th that showed no scorch marks on the glide vehicle's surface and a clean coat of paint. The Defense Ministry rejected that claim, saying the HGV "was built with a robust design based on domestically developed heat-resistant materials with excellent thermal tolerance, achieving thermal protection performance that leaves no scorching even in a hypersonic environment."
The North then returned to the question of the South's HGV technology. "No cutting-edge technology can prevent the physical phenomenon of paint burning off as surface temperatures rise from aerodynamic heating within the atmosphere," Kim said. "For a hypersonic weapon to keep its paint layer fully intact until the moment of impact defies common sense." He added sarcastically that "the attempt to dress up even an unavoidable law of physics as special technology looks threadbare."
Kim also took aim at the South Korean Defense Ministry's stated plan to advance its HGV weapons systems, shifting the blame for military provocation. "The enemy's confrontational ambition has given us the clearest possible justification for strengthening our defense capabilities," he said. "It has plainly proved why we must hold to the line of overwhelming superiority in strength."
The prevailing interpretation is that North Korea's use of its most senior military officials to disparage the South's HGV achievement reflects a sense of crisis over its military disadvantage. Flying at speeds above Mach 5 and descending along irregular trajectories, HGVs are extremely difficult to intercept and are widely regarded as a game changer on the modern battlefield.
North Korea launched an upgraded version of the Hwasong-11Ma, a short-range hypersonic missile, on the 20th of last month with leader Kim Jong-un in attendance, and followed that with a test launch of an intermediate-range hypersonic missile on the 3rd of this month, continuing its show of force. The South Korean military completed its successful HGV test launch on the 8th of this month from a sea barge at the Agency for Defense Development's Anheung test site, 17 days after a North Korean landmine provocation in the Demilitarized Zone.