While adding to its barrage of missile launches in recent months, North Korea remained publicly silent for a fifth day on the fate of an American soldier who bolted into the North across the heavily armed Korean border this week.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the launches were detected beginning around 4 am but did not immediately report how many missiles were fired or how far they flew. It said the United States and South Korean militaries were closely analysing the launches.
North Korea in recent years has been testing newly developed cruise missiles it describes as “strategic,” implying an intent to arm them with nuclear weapons. Experts say the main mission of those weapons would include striking naval assets and ports. Designed to fly like small airplanes and travelalong landscape that would make them harder to detect by radar, cruise missiles are among a growing collection of North Korean weapons aimed at overwhelming missile defenses in the South.
On Wednesday, North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles from an area near its capital, Pyongyang. They flew about 550 kilometers (340 miles) before landing in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
The flight distance of those missiles roughly matched the distance between Pyongyang and the South Korean port city of Busan, where the USS Kentucky on Tuesday made the first visit by a US nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea since the 1980s.
Also Tuesday, American soldier Pvt. Travis King sprinted across the border into North Korea while on a tour of an inter-Korean truce village.
North Korea’s state media has yet to comment on King and the country has not responded to US requests to clarify where he is being kept and what his condition is. US officials have expressed concern about King’s well-being, considering North Korea’s previous rough treatment of some American detainees. It could be weeks, or even months, before North Korea releases meaningful information about King, analysts say, as the country could drag out his detention to maximize leverage and add urgency to US efforts to secure his release.
Some experts say the North may try to use King for propaganda or as a bargaining chip to coax political and security concessions from Washington, possibly tying his release with the United States cutting back its military activities with South Korea.
"With so many moving pieces, it’s important not to attribute causation to mere correlation of events. But North Korea’s missile provocations do not foreshadow an easy negotiation to secure Travis King’s release," said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at South Korea's Ewha University. “Unauthorised border crossings endanger personnel, risk a political and even military incident, and can be exploited by North Korean hostage diplomacy.”