North Korea has launched a warship two weeks after it was damaged during an earlier launch attempt, in an incident that drew harsh criticism from the country’s leader Kim Jong Un.
The 5,000-tonne destroyer, which was restored to balance earlier this week, was launched on Thursday and is now moored at a pier, state-run news agency KCNA said.
The ship is expected to be fully restored before a ruling party meeting sometime this month, KCNA added.
Kim, who witnessed the warship tipping over during the first launch attempt, criticised the incident as a “criminal act” that “severely damaged the [country’s] dignity and pride”.
It was the result of “absolute carelessness, irresponsibility and unscientific empiricism”, he said.
At least four officials including Ri Hyong-son, the deputy director of the ruling Workers’ Party’s Munitions Industry Department, have been arrested over the incident.
Mr Ri is part of the party’s Central Military Commission, which commands the Korean People’s Army and is responsible for developing and implementing North Korea’s military policies.
It is not clear what punishment the officials might face, but the authoritarian state has been known to sentence officials it finds guilty of wrongdoing to forced labour and even death.
The effort to right the ship was a manual process, according to researchers from 38 North, a website run by the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University in the US.
Satellite imagery shows workers on the quay pulling tethers and using barrage balloons to bring the vessel back to balance, they said, adding that some of the balloons appeared to still be attached to the vessel.
Some analysts saw Kim’s swift and severe response to the earlier failed launch as a signal that Pyongyang would continue to advance its military capabilities.
The regime is “deeply invested in the image of a rising military power” and the failure may harden their resolve to push that forward, says Jihoon Yu, a research fellow at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.
Kim’s “unusually severe” response to the failure is aimed at protecting the leader’s image and reasserting his authority, he adds.
Michael Madden, a North Korea expert from the Stimson Center in Washington, sees Kim’s response as a sign of the “high priority” his regime is putting into developing warships.
Just weeks before the botched launch, Pyongyang had unveiled a similar warship in another part of the country.
Kim called that warship a “breakthrough” in modernising North Korea’s navy and said it would be deployed early next year.
