Give Me a Crash Course In . . . North Korean missiles

What is Pyongyang up to now?

After a string of damp squibs North Korea's military engineers have something to celebrate this week. An intermediate-range missile launched from the isolated country reportedly reached an altitude of 1,000km and a distance of 400km – halfway to Japan. Experts say it is only a matter of time before the Musudan ballistic missile is able to reach United States territory. In April North Korea appears to have fired a missile from a submarine, giving it "second strike" capabilities if its land-based weapons are disabled.

Why is that a concern?

Pyongyang has conducted four nuclear tests since 2006 and is trying to shrink a nuclear bomb to fit on a ballistic missile. In March Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, boasted that its scientists had done just that – to widespread scepticism. Still, the country has shown great determination, despite endless setbacks. If it succeeds in developing even inaccurate weapons and delivery systems they would pose a threat to cities such as Tokyo and Seoul – and one day, perhaps, the west coast of the United States.

Who is upset?

Almost everyone. “The threat to Japan is intensifying,” warned Japan’s defence minister, Gen Nakatani, after Wednesday’s test. “Complete isolation and self-destruction” wait at the end of North Korea’s “reckless provocation”, according to South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye. The United States and the United Nations joined the chorus of condemnation. Even nuclear-armed China, Pyongyang’s sole important ally, though more muted in its criticism, is known to be upset by North Korea’s weapons programme – for its own strategic reasons.

So why doesn’t North Korea stop? 

Building a bomb and threatening to lob it at its enemies make sense from North Korea’s perspective. Nuclear weapons are the ultimate deterrent, and Kim’s regime wants to deter the United States. North Korea’s national identity hinges around the outcome of the fratricidal US-backed war of 1950-3 that created two irreconcilable regimes, held apart since by a brittle truce. Pyongyang keeps memories of that war vividly alive, and Washington helps to reinforce them.

In what way? 

Tensions often spike in spring, during joint US-South Korean military exercises, which Pyongyang considers a prelude to invasion. Tensions are elevated by the very public deployment of American B-52 aircraft, carrying the implied threat of nuclear weapons. Every North Korean child is taught about the last time B-52 bombers were dispatched. For a month in 1976, after a deadly border skirmish, the United States sent bombers along the Korean Peninsula; they veered off at the last moment.

Can North Korea be brought to the negotiating table? 

Pyongyang had been demanding a peace treaty with the US since the early 1970s, but cold-war politics blocked it. Since then Seoul and Washington have staged the military drills a few kilometres from the DMZ, or demilitarised zone, that divides the peninsula. The drills include a simulated nuclear strike. Despite a decade of detente in the 1990s, both sides are still held in the grip of mutual suspicion and loathing. North Korea has offered to suspend its missile programme if the drills are stopped, but Washington and Seoul say Pyongyang must make the first move.

So what happens next?

In the absence of a permanent peace treaty North Korea will continue to use nuclear threats until it gets security guarantees. In 2013, after six decades of “slow-motion war thinly covered by the 1953 armistice agreement”, Pyongyang finally snapped, says Leonid Petrov, a North Korea expert at the Australian National University. Kim Jong-un is simply reminding the world “about this unresolved problem inherited from the cold-war era”.