A North Korean Submarine Missing and Believed to Have Sunk at Sea Reports from various media sources reveal that a North Korean submarine is now missing and believed to have sunk. This happens at the moment when joint military exercises are taking place between the United States and South Korea. The largest ever conducted by these two countries, with already strained tensions, these exercises are taking place on the peninsula.
Its 70-ton Yugo class had cruised off the coast of North Korea several days before its disappearance. The Yugo-class boat is antiquated, and it is rumored that North Korea used it for spy missions; it would have carried a crew of about eight. “Apart from that, a South Korean military insider said they are easy to break down mechanically because they are aged and are under the hobbling economic constraints of North Korea,” he said during an interview with the Yonhap news agency.
The U.S. Navy also monitored as the sub stayed in port, the U.S. Naval Institute reports. CNN has learned elsewhere, that U.S. military assets observed the North Korean navy operating in a search pattern. The search area includes large-scale US and South Korean combined exercises now taking place in and around the Korean Peninsula.
This comes just as North Korea is gearing up for a massive military parade to mark the 75th anniversary of the ruling Workers Party. But commentators believe North Korea could make the “new strategic weapon” flagged by leader Kim Jong Un happen. Satellite photos captured troops rehearsing for the parade and constructing a VIP viewing area in Damascus Square.
The domestic situation in North Korea is very complicated and fragile,” said Sue Mi Terry, senior fellow at CSIS, in an email. “With economic sanctions, lockdowns along the border with China because of COVID, and recent natural disasters. And that is why it’s doubly more important for it to show strength and defiance, domestically and internationally.”.
No wonder then that there is very much of a guesswork spree on what the new strategic weapon could be. For organizations like the CSIS, it could be a new form of an advanced SLBM, since North Korea has increased activity at the Sinpo South Shipyard where North Korea builds its submarines. According to South Korea’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Won In-choul, North Korea has recently been repairing typhoon damage, and a test of an SLBM could come at any moment.
Other watchers have speculated that this new strategic weapon probably mentioned by Kim Jong Un was an SLBM. Many former US intelligence officials—including a prominent arms control consultant, Markus Garlauskas, and Bruce Perry—have made a case for something even more disruptive: a large, multipurpose road-mobile ballistic missile with multiple independent re-entry vehicles, which would fundamentally complicate US missile defenses.
Into this Tock-scape bolted an American soldier, Private 2nd Class Travis King, across the heavily armed border into North Korea. King is being flown back to the United States after he was recently released from a South Korean prison following close to two months on charges of assault. Instead, he boarded a flight home and joined the huge number of other tourists patronizing a tour of Panmunjom, the Korean border village; he then bolted dramatically across the border.
According to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking on Monday, King is most likely being detained in North Korea, and they are following the situation very closely. The whole incident raises tensions in this already heated region, particularly against the backdrop of North Korea’s recent missile tests and a nuclear-armed U.S. submarine making its first dent in South Korean waters in four decades.