South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says North Korea is preparing a second launch of a new, powerful mid-range missile capable of reaching U.S. military installations in the Pacific.
Yonhap says it learned from an unidentified government official that the military “is picking up signs which indicate” that the North will launch the Musudan “in the near future.”
But a spokesman for South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the ministry had no such intelligence to confirm Yonhap’s story.
The Mu-sudan is based on an old Soviet submarine launched ballistic missile design that the North converted to be fired from a mobile land-based launcher. It has a range of anywhere between 3,000-4,000 kilometers, which includes the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.
Pyongyang test launched a Musudan missile on April 15, the birthday of Kim Il Sung, the country’s first president and grandfather of current leader Kim Jong Un. South Korean and U.S. officials say the launch was a failure.
North Korea claimed Saturday it conducted a submarine-launched ballistic missile test personally supervised by Kim Jong Un.
