The Washington Post:
North Korea has unveiled what it said was a domestically designed engine for an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States, the latest in a steady drumbeat of threats coming from Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Saturday’s announcement, through the official Korean Central News Agency, could not be immediately verified. But analysts said Pyongyang’s constant boasts of military advances have sent a clear message to the United States.
“With all the missiles they’re building, the ranges are getting longer and they’re going to be able to throw more stuff further,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif.
“It seems pretty clear that they’re sick of us making fun of them, and they’re going to shove it down our throats,” Lewis said.
North Korea recently unveiled a KN-08 road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile, also known as a Rodong-C, but with engines that did not look like those that had powered other recent launches. This left nuclear scientists scratching their heads.
On Saturday, KCNA said that North Korea had successfully tested, under Kim’s supervision, a new “indigenously designed” engine at the Sohae missile launch site near the country’s west coast.
“Now the DPRK can tip new type intercontinental ballistic rockets with more powerful nuclear warheads and keep any cesspool of evils in the earth, including the U.S. mainland, within our striking range and reduce them to ashes so that they may not survive in our planet,” Kim Jong Un said, according to KCNA, referring to North Korea by its official acronym.
He emphasized “the need to diversify nuclear attack means at a higher level to cope with the ever-more increasing nuclear threats and arbitrariness of the U.S. imperialists and thus decisively counter nukes in kind.”
Previous estimates of North Korea’s firepower had it just able to reach the continental United States, but if it had successfully manufactured an 80-ton booster — as the Treasury Department recently claimed in sanctions against Pyongyang — it would put the U.S. mainland within relatively easy reach, analysts said.
