SEOUL—North Korea fired two unidentified projectiles toward the waters off its east coast, according to South Korea’s military, in another weapons test aimed at increasing pressure on the U.S. to provide sanctions relief amid stalled denuclearization talks.
Seoul’s Defense Ministry on Thursday said the North conducted the test at about 4:59 p.m. local time a few miles from the North Korean port city of Hamhung, near a town believed to host a military airfield.
The latest provocation marks the North’s 14th weapons test of this year, according to South and North Korean government announcements, and follows a visit by leader Kim Jong Un to a military base near the Yellow Sea days earlier to oversee the testing of coastal artillery.
Experts said the tests signal Pyongyang’s growing impatience with Washington, which has been reluctant to ease sanctions that have hurt North Korea’s economy. Mr. Kim has repeatedly said economic growth is a major policy goal this year.
“North Korea is trying to tell the U.S. these weapons tests can become much more frequent, if the Americans don’t yield concessions,” said Shin Beom-cheol, a former adviser to the South Korean government and now a senior researcher at the Seoul-based Asan Institute, a private think tank.
“They are also separately testing the reactions of the U.S. and South Korean militaries to these weapons tests,” he said.
Pyongyang has escalated its threats in recent weeks to cut off negotiations with the U.S., protesting scheduled U.S.-South Korea military exercises and attacking Washington’s “hostile” policy against the isolated regime. Last week it rejected President Trump’s latest invitation for another nuclear summit.
The Kim regime has set a year-end deadline for the U.S. to comply with its demands, threatening to escalate its provocations in 2020.
“Washington is too busy with the impeachment hearings, and appears to be ignoring Kim Jong Un’s year-end ultimatum,” said Nam Sung-wook, a professor of North Korean studies at Korea University. “Kim loses face the more Washington looks like it ignores him. Weapons tests give him an excuse to tell his people that he stood up to U.S. sanctions and bullying.”
Nuclear talks between Washington and Pyongyang haven’t made much progress since a summit between Messrs. Trump and Kim in February ended without a deal. In June, Mr. Trump made an impromptu visit to the demilitarized zone on the inter-Korean border to meet Mr. Kim and agreed to restart working-level negotiations. But talks collapsed almost as soon as they resumed in October, with North Korean diplomats walking out after accusing their American counterparts of not offering adequate economic and security concessions.
Despite test-firing short-range missiles and rockets since April, Pyongyang has refrained from testing long-range missiles or nuclear warheads since November 2017—something that Mr. Trump has claimed as a foreign-policy win and which North Korea has said that it expects to be rewarded for.
Write to Andrew Jeong at andrew.jeong@wsj.com
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2019-11-28 15:05:00Z
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