Donald Trump with Kim Jong Un

Jihye Lee, Tribune News Service

Kim Jong Un oversaw a live-fire military exercise on Saturday that potentially included North Korea’s first ballistic missile launch since 2017 — challenging US President Donald Trump’s bottom line in nuclear talks.

Kim watched as “large-caliber, long-range multiple-rocket launchers and tactical guided weapons” were fired off North Korea’s eastern coast Saturday, according to the official Korean Central News Agency. The state media report Sunday was accompanied by a photo of what non-proliferation analysts said appeared to be the launch of a short-range ballistic missile.

While such a test would violate United Nations resolutions imposing sanctions on North Korea, it would stop short of breaching Kim’s own pledge to refrain from testing longer-range missiles that could threaten the US Trump had earlier brushed off the incident, saying in a tweet Saturday that Kim “does not want to break his promise to me.”

“Kim Jong Un may be starting his ‹push-the-line’ strategy, gradually seeing how much Trump will turn a blind eye to,” said Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of its security studies program. “Not good.”

Neither US nor South Korean authorities immediately confirmed a ballistic missile launch, which was bolstered by a satellite image from Planet Labs Inc. showing what appeared to be a single missile contrail at the exercise site. South Korea’s defense ministry said Sunday that North Korea tested “new tactical weapons” and artillery that traveled 70-240 kilometers (40-150 miles), without mentioning “missiles.”

Nathan Hunt, an independent defense researcher, said the South Korean statement was “skirting over” North Korea’s ballistic missile launch. “They did indeed test a new short-range missile, or as others call close-range ballistic missile, and this was not just an artillery drill,” Hunt said.

Either way, the exercise was Kim’s most significant provocation since he launched an intercontinental ballistic missile in November 2017, declared his nuclear weapons program “complete” and opened talks. Kim has expressed increasing frustration since Trump refused his demands for sanctions relief and walked out of their second summit in Hanoi in February.

The North Korean leader accused the US of “bad faith” during a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok in late April. He had earlier told North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly that he would wait “with patience till the end of this year” for the US to make a better offer.

Analysts said the weapon featured in the KCNA photograph appeared to be a solid-fuel ballistic missile similar to a Russian Iskander that could be stored while fueled, deployed and fired with less detection time. North Korea had put a similar weapon on display during a military parade in February 2018. “This is problematic in the fact that, despite it being short-ranged, it’s still a ballistic missile — and it violates the sanctions resolutions,” said Kim Dong-yub, a professor of North Korea studies at Kyungnam University’s Institute of Far Eastern Studies.

The North Korean exercise came days ahead of US Special Representative Stephen Biegun’s expected arrival in the region. The top American nuclear envoy is scheduled to travel to Tokyo on Tuesday and to Seoul on Thursday.

Adding to the confusion were South Korea’s revisions of its accounts of the nature and scale of the weapons discharged from North Korea’s eastern port of Wonsan. After first calling them “missiles,” the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff later changed its description to “projectiles.”

Japan’s defence ministry said Saturday that the country hadn’t detected any missiles entering its exclusive economic zone and as such there was no immediate impact to its national security. Still, South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s spokeswoman condemned the incident on Saturday, saying in a statement that it went against a September agreement between the two Koreas to halt “hostile activities.” Trump has cited Kim’s self-imposed freeze on missile and nuclear weapons tests to support his decision to continue negotiations with the North Korean leader.