north korea has fired two ballistic
missiles that flew hundreds of
kilometers to land in the sea of japan
the prime minister called them a threat
to peace in a violation of u.n
resolutions
the launches are pyongyang's first
ballistic missile test since president
biden took office in january
professor robert kelly is a north korea
expert at busan national university in
south korea
and we asked him how much for threat
these missiles are the north koreans
have had
a pretty significant missile capacity
now for at least a decade and the
ability to strike the united states
right to send them very very far um for
at least four years
so i'm not really sure that this
actually adds anything
dramatic that we haven't seen i don't
think it indicates for example the north
koreans aren't willing to more willing
to use them for example
my own read of this is that it's
probably sort of a test or sort of an
effort to kind of provoke the bite
administration in its early days to tell
them you know we're here
you can't push us around pay attention
to us that sort of thing i think the
biden people actually be quite wise not
to say a whole lot i mean this is how
they responded to the shorter range
tests just a few days ago
and the reason i suggest that is not
because north korea is not a threat it
obviously is the japanese are right in
their response
it's just that the biden people and the
south koreans and the japanese too and
we just don't have a lot of good options
right and we can't strike the sites
obviously we're not going to
risk a conflict with north korea they've
got nuclear weapons um north korea is
already under sanctions we can't i mean
i suppose you could just slap more on
them but that's
you know we've already gone down that
route pretty far so the biden
administration's options are pretty
limited and i think this is why the
biden people have been
fairly quiet about it right i don't i
think they don't want this to be sort of
ginned up or sort of read into
a test of its resolve or its willingness
to sort of be tough
because the options are just so poor