North Korea ‘developing missile-launching submarine’

Recent satellite images offer fresh evidence of North Korea developing a marine-based missile system that would give the nuclear-armed state a survivable second-strike nuclear capability, a U.S. think-tank said Friday. The commercial satellite pictures suggest the conning tower of a new North Korean submarine - first seen in July last year - houses one or two vertical launch tubes for either ballistic or cruise missiles, the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University said. Development of a submarine-launched missile capability would take the North Korean nuclear threat to a new level, allowing deployment far beyond the Korean peninsula.

The boat could serve as an experimental test bed for land-attack missile technology which, if successful, may be integrated into a new class of submarines.

Post by research group on the website ‘38north’

However, the institute noted Pyongyang possessed no such capability as yet and stressed that its development would be an extremely “expensive and time-consuming endeavour” with no guarantee of success. North Korea’s small submarine fleet is comprised of largely obsolete Soviet-era and modified Chinese vessels, but suggestions that it is experimenting with a marine-based missile system have been around for a while.

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