The South Korean military recently revealed that it has made rapid progress in developing hypersonic missiles and is advancing plans to test them next year. Experts say that this weapon, if successful, will become a new deterrent to North Korea and significantly impact the status quo on the Korean Peninsula.
An AGM missile traveling at Mach 5 can reach Pyongyang less than 2 minutes after being launched from an aircraft over Seoul.
Hypersonic weapons are maneuverable weapons that can travel at five times the speed of sound (Mach 5) or 3,836 miles per hour. It’s also the delimiting speed separating supersonic speed (below Mach 5) from hypersonic speed (above Mach 5).
Their advantages include long flight distance, high cruising airspeed, instant strikes on long-range targets, strong maneuverability, and low detectability by satellites and air defense radars. Hypersonic missiles are highly capable of penetrating the missile defense system.
Military expert and commentator Tony Xia told The Epoch Times on Jan. 26 that “South Korea must always, or at least in perception, maintain a strategic military advantage over the North due to it possessing weapons of mass destruction while continuing to develop those weapons.”
He said South Korea has been under constant pressure to ensure that its weapons are advanced and up to date, not just to defeat its adversary but to minimize the casualties even in the face of a military victory. More importantly, the South’s military superiority can effectively deter a conflict with the North.
“What a hypersonic missile is after is to ensure that it breaks through the enemy’s air defenses and destroys the target accurately in the shortest possible time. This weapon will form a new deterrent to North Korea, especially for high-value time-sensitive targets. The so-called high-value target may be North Korea’s nuclear missile launch system or the top person in charge of decision-making. In short, the Kim Jong-un regime can’t ignore this capability,” Xia said.
“Due to its one-hit-kill feature, hypersonic missiles will effectively impact the status quo on the Korean Peninsula, especially in the military situation where the two Koreas are confronting each other at close range. The deterrence they form is no less than that of nuclear weapons. Moreover, it’s also not subject to the nuclear threshold as a conventional weapon.”
Kim Taewoo, former head of Seoul’s Korea Institute for National Unification and a former senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, said on Jan. 25 that North Korea had test-launched hypersonic missiles in the past. And those missiles would still be challenging to counter using South Korea’s current defense system.
Record Number of Missile Launches
North Korea ramped up its missile tests to an all-time high in 2022, totaling about 92 ballistic and other missiles. At one point, it launched 23 missiles in a single day.Pyongyang claimed that it had tested its Hwasong-8 hypersonic missile in September 2021 while making the same claims of successfully testing other hypersonic missiles in the subsequent years, according to the Yonhap report.
Since 1984, North Korea has completed more than 270 missile launches and nuclear tests, of which more than a quarter were conducted in 2022, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies Missile Defense Project.
Those strategic weapons include tactical nuclear weapons, a new intercontinental ballistic missile, hypersonic gliding flight warheads, nuclear-powered submarines, and a reconnaissance satellite.
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