The National Interest:
North Korea says its latest missile test was aimed at demonstrating its capability to sink American aircraft carriers, South Korean media reported.
On Monday, North Korea conducted its latest ballistic test in Wonsan, in the eastern part of the country. The missile, believed to be a version of its Scud extended-range (ER) missile, traveled roughly 250 miles (four hundred kilometers) before falling into the Sea of Japan.
Immediately following the test, North Korea said it was aimed at demonstrating a new maneuverable reentry vehicle (MaRV), which allows the warhead to make inflight corrections during its terminal phase to greatly improve accuracy. “The present test-fire aimed at verifying the technological indices of the new-type precision guided ballistic rocket capable of making ultra-precision strike on the enemies’ objects at any area,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.
The report further claimed that the missile landed within seven meters of its intended target, which would be shockingly accurate. According to Yonhap News Agency, a South Korean publication, North Korea’s normal Scud missiles have a circular error probable (CEP), a commonly used accuracy measurement, of between 450 and 1,000 meters, while China’s much-discussed carrier-killer missile has a CEP of thirty to forty meters.
The same Yonhap report said that North Korea “asserted” the newly accurate missile was meant to demonstrate North Korea’s ability “to strike moving targets at sea with precision.”
That claim was not included in KCNA’s English-language report on the missile test, but U.S. officials did raise that concern in earlier failed tests of what was believed at the time to be the same Scud-variant tested on Monday. The Yonhap report went on to claim that “the North’s pursuit of its own anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), often called an ‘aircraft carrier killer,’ is an open secret”…
