[Focus on the Korean Peninsula] Kim Jong-un's aim at the economic scene just before the missile launch

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Let's continue talking with Ahn Jung-shik, a reporter specializing in North Korea.

[Ahn Jung-shik/Reporter Ahn Jung-sik/Reporter specializing in North Korea: Anyway, if the launch failed this time, there must be some cause.

Normally, it would take at least three months to find the cause of this failure, correct it, and fire it again.

However, I think it will be different in the case of North Korea, because it is understandable if you look at the case of the Musudan missile launch in 2016.

At that time, North Korea continued to fire the Musudan missile eight times in seven months, despite repeated failures, and succeeded only once.

They even fired twice a day, but in the case of April 28, they fired at 6:40 in the morning and failed, and then fired again at 7:26 in the evening, 13 hours later, and failed.

Looking at this case, despite this failure, we will launch again soon, so it doesn't seem like a big deal.]

[Ahn Jung-sik/Reporter specializing in North Korea: We cannot know exactly what is happening inside North Korea now.

In the case of the Musudan missile I just described, it failed and continued to fire.

In other words, he seems to have this idea that it is important to succeed quickly first, rather than take time and calmly analyze the cause.

In particular, in this case, the explosion occurred at a distance of less than 20 km, which means that the first stage projectile had a problem even before the first and second stage projectiles were separated.

But the same missiles were launched on the 27th of last month and the 5th of this month.

So, from the perspective of North Korea, there is no big problem with the 1st stage, but there is a possibility that something went wrong this time, let's fire the 1st stage one more time.

Also, from a political point of view, there seems to be some pressure, like Kim Il-sung's birthday and a large-scale military parade on the 15th of next month, so it must be done quickly somehow.]

[Ahn Jung-shik / Reporter Ahn Jung-sik / Reporter specializing in North Korea: The ROK and US military authorities have been watching North Korea launch new ICBMs all week.

On the morning of the 16th, it was reported that Kim Jong-un had visited the construction site of a house in Pyongyang's 10,000 households.

In general, I visited a construction site. This is an action for people's livelihood. At first glance, there is a part that can be interpreted as meaning that we will focus on people's livelihood rather than military provocation.

So, there was a part where I thought that the launch was delayed, but the missile launch occurred just a few hours after the report came out.

This is about having set the missile launch date in advance and purposely visited the economic site just before that, but it seems to be a move that was trying to confuse the North Korean situation after knowing that the outside world was monitoring the situation.]