North Korea began the year with a spate of missile tests, raising tensions at a sensitive time: China is gearing up to host the Winter Olympics in Beijing next month, and South Korea is preparing for its presidential election on March 9.
The latest flurry of missile tests suggests that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is both pushing ahead with his program of modernizing his country’s missile forces and trying to jolt the Biden administration out of its diplomatic slumber and force Washington to engage with North Korea on Mr. Kim’s terms.
In the first two weapons tests this month, conducted on Jan. 5 and Jan. 11, North Korea launched what it called hypersonic ballistic missiles with detachable gliding warheads, which made them harder to intercept because they were designed not only to fly extremely fast but also to change course during flight.