North Korea has successfully tested a new, high-powered rocket engine, state media said Tuesday, a move Seoul said was designed to showcase its progress toward being able to target the US east coast.
The ground test comes less than two weeks after Pyongyang detonated what it said was a miniaturised atomic bomb.
Taken together, the two tests raise the prospect that the isolated state could be inching toward its ultimate goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit Washington DC.
State-run news agency KCNA trumpeted the engine test, which it said would give the country “sufficient carrier capability for launching various kinds of satellites.”
Rocket engines are easily re-purposed for use in missiles, and outside observers say that Pyongyang’s space program is a fig leaf for weapons tests.
The North’s leader Kim Jong-Un hailed the test and called for more rocket launches to turn the country into a “possessor of geostationary satellites in a couple of years to come,” KCNA said.
A geostationary satellite must be propelled to an altitude of 36,000 kilometers (22,500 miles), a Unification Ministry official was quoted as saying by South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency.
“The distance to the eastern part of the United States is some 12,000 kilometers. The North is thus showing off its ability” to hit the US east coast, the official added.
Rocket scientist Chae Yeon-Seok at the South’s Korea Aerospace Research Institute said such an engine would represent “a technical leap forward” in developing launch vehicles.

Source: Arab News