Japan Times:
North Korea has fired a barrage of missiles, artillery pieces and rockets into the waters off its east coast, including a medium-range ballistic missile that fell near Japan’s territorial waters this week.
The launches are meant to test its weapons systems, express anger in times of standoffs with South Korea and the United States, or prove it has the capability to attack its archrivals.
U.S., South Korean and Japanese defense officials held a videoconference on Thursday and issued a statement condemning the launches as “provocative acts” that posed “a serious threat to peace and stability.”
Little is known about what happens to the weapons after they land. Do they cause any environmental problems in the ocean? Are some countries trying to retrieve the missile parts to study them?
Here is what we know about the likely fate of the weapons in the sea, which in some places is 3,000 meters (1.9 miles) deep or possibly deeper.
Where are the missiles now?
North Korea’s Rodong missiles are 15 meters long and most other weapons it has fired are shorter. The parts are scattered in the deep ocean, and professor Roh Taeseong at South Korea’s Inha University said “it’s like throwing grains of sand into Seoul’s Han River.”
North Korea often launches its missiles from different sites and fires them for different distances depending on what it wants from each launch. This means there is little chance of missiles landing in the same area. North Korean missiles are also known for poor accuracy, so it is highly unlikely that many pieces would end up near each other, even if North Korea is aiming at the same area.
When missiles hit the ocean, they face a huge impact that can break them into multiple pieces. “It’s like hitting a concrete floor,” said analyst Chae Yeon-seok at South Korea’s state-run Korea Aerospace Research Institute. He said the Rodong missile fired Wednesday must have shattered into more than 10 pieces.
Some other experts say the amount of damage can depend on the angle of impact, with missiles entering at straighter angles suffering less damage.
Retrieving missile parts
In the case of a launch of a new or particularly threatening design, South Korea, the U.S. and Japan are likely to search for fragments and salvage what they can. Some parts from those rockets, particularly their first stages, can be fairly large. The three-stage Unha-3 rocket which North Korea used to send a satellite into space in 2012 was 30 meters long.
But it is virtually impossible to recover meaningful fragments of smaller missiles once they sink into the sea.
Even if South Korea or other countries were to successfully recover parts of a Rodong missile, it is unlikely they would learn anything new about the Soviet Scud-based weapon they have already analyzed for decades.
After Wednesday’s launch, Japan still dispatched destroyers and P-3C Orion surveillance aircraft to search for any debris.
Roh described the move as a “political show” by the conservative government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which wants to build a stronger military by stressing to its people how dangerous North Korean missiles are.
The Maritime Self-Defense Force was unable to find any remnants of the missile, Defense Minister Tomomi Inada said on Friday.
