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 towards 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 towards 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 programme 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 kilometres (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 kilometres. 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.

It suggests the North is “coming close to having an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could hit the US mainland”.
 

A look at North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

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AFP, Reuters

Pyongyang regularly parades homegrown missiles and boasts of its plan to develop long-range missiles capable of targeting America.

It has already carried out a series of long-range missile tests presented as satellite launches, most recently in February, and has fired missiles from a submarine.

A proven submarine-launched ballistic missile system would allow deployment far beyond the Korean peninsula and a “second-strike” capability in the event of an attack on the North’s military bases.

After supervising the test at the country’s Sohae satellite-launching site, leader Kim Jong-Un called on officials, scientists and technicians “to round off the preparations for launching the satellite as soon as possible”, KCNA reported.

Kim “expressed great satisfaction” with the results of the test, according to KCNA, and said the North had made cutting-edge scientific advances despite difficult economic conditions.

North Korea has been hit by five sets of United Nations sanctions since it first tested a nuclear device in 2006, but has insisted it will continue.

Professor Yang Moo-Jin of the University of North Korean Studies said the North had set a five-year space development programme that ends this year.

“This new test heralds an upcoming landmark ICBM test. The next test, disguised as a satellite launch, is likely to come when the UN Security Council adopts new sanctions over its last nuclear test or around the time when the US presidential election takes place in November”, Yang said.

The US has a range of missile-defence technologies at its disposal, including the Aegis Combat System, Patriot missiles and sophisticated radars.

Washington is also working with Seoul to install a missile defence system known as THAAD in South Korea, though Beijing says the hardware poses a significant threat to regional security.

Yonhap news agency said two B-52 heavy bombers were to be sent from Guam to the South as a fresh show of force against the North this week.

Harvard and Columbia university research showing smoke from land fires in Southeast Asia led to more than 100,000 premature deaths last year “makes no sense at all,” an official at Indonesia’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday.

Indonesian government records show only 24 deaths related to forest fires in 2015, but the disaster was estimated to have left more than half a million Indonesians suffering from respiratory ailments.

Indonesia is under global pressure to put an end to slash-and-burn land clearances for palm and pulp plantations which send clouds of toxic smoke over the region each year.

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The Straits Times, Stomp, facebook, Twitter

The university research estimates pollution exposure from last year’s fires killed 91,600 people in Indonesia, 6,500 in Malaysia and 2,200 in Singapore in 2015 and 2016, significantly higher than government records. “Given the severe haze in Equatorial Asia in 2015, the 100,000 premature deaths in that region are not so surprising,”said Loretta Mickley, a senior researcher at Harvard focusing on atmospheric pollution, who contributed to the research.

Read also: NEA writes to Indonesia over haze concerns

Health Ministry director general of disease prevention and control Mohamad Subuh told Reuters the research data was wrong. “Data on deaths is clear. We have surveillance,” Subuh said, adding that the assumptions of mortality based on mathematical calculations were “irresponsible”.

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Reuters, AFP, The Straits Times, Berita Harian

Every year, Indonesia faces criticism from its neighbours Singapore and Malaysia over the smog, euphemistically known as”haze”, and its failure to stop the fires from being lit.

Read also: Singapore rebukes Indonesia’s remark on legal intervention on haze act

Last year’s fires were among the worst in the region’s history, with billions of dollars worth of environmental damage, weeks of flight and school disruptions and thousands suffering from respiratory disease.

Divers say a towering coral known as the “Big Mushroom” at the heart of a world-famous dive site in Taiwan has been toppled after Typhoon Meranti struck last week.

The super-typhoon was the strongest storm for 21 years to strike Taiwan, leaving one dead before killing another 28 as it moved to eastern China.

Green Island off Taiwan’s east coast – which attracts divers from around the globe – has been left reeling from the underwater damage caused by the storm and by the smaller Typhoon Malakas which followed it.

It was home to the 10-metre-high (33 feet) mushroom-shaped pore coral, the biggest of its kind in the world.

But videos posted by local dive instructor Yu Ming-hung show the coral lying on its side on the seabed.

Strongest typhoon of the year Meranti

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AFP, Reuters

He called it a “loss and heartache for the Taiwanese” on his Facebook page, where the footage was posted.

Green Island and the nearby Orchid Island remain largely cut off. Regular ferries have not yet resumed due to debris in the harbour.

The storm also swept away a lighthouse at a dock in the eastern county of Taitung, where ferries to the islands depart. Tourists were evacuated from the islands before Meranti hit.

Officials said they feared an increase in extreme weather could cause more damage to marine life and to tourism.

“We were shocked to hear the news. It is a great pity,” said Chuang Hui-fang, a department chief at the East Coast National Scenic Area Administration, of the toppling of the “Big Mushroom”.

“The magnitude of typhoons is getting bigger than before. It seems these unusual weather phenomenon are becoming increasingly common.” The “Big Mushroom” is at least 1,000 years old and has grown on the 18-metre-deep seabed since the Song Dynasty, diver Yu said on his Facebook post.

It has been named as one of the top 20 iconic dive sites in Asia by the Professional Association of Diving Instructors.