China is insisting that it has successfully launched an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) carrying a dummy warhead into the Pacific Ocean.
The ICBM was launched at 08:44 local time (04:44 GMT) Wednesday and “fell into expected sea areas,” Beijing’s defense ministry said, adding that the test launch was “routine” and part of its “annual training.”
The missile type and trajectory were unknown, but Chinese state media said that Beijing had “informed the countries concerned in advance.”
Japan later said it got “no notice” over the test launch.
China’s nuclear weapon tests usually occur at home, and it previously test-launched ICBMs west into the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang region.
This is the first time since 1980 that it fired an ICBM into international waters, according to reports.
“Unless I’m missing something, I think this is the first time this has ever happened – and been acknowledged to have happened – in a very long time,” Ankit Panda, the nuclear weapons analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said in X.
He said Beijing’s description of the test as “routine” and “annual” was peculiar “given that they don’t do this sort of thing either routinely or annually.”
The Japanese government said Wednesday that China gave no advance notice of the ICBM launch.
“There was no notice from the Chinese side in advance,” government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters.
In an early statement Wednesday afternoon, Japan’s defense ministry said that no damage occurred to its vessels.
According to Japanese broadcaster NHK, “We will continue to collect and analyze information on the movements of the Chinese military, and we will exercise extreme caution in our vigilance and monitoring.
When China last such tested – in May 1980 – the ICBM flew 9,070km and landed in the Pacific; that test involved 18 Chinese naval ships and is still considered one of China’s most significant naval missions.
“Timing is everything,” Drew Thompson, a visiting research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, wrote on X.
\\”[China’s] statement claims the launch does not target any country, but there are high levels of tension between China and Japan, Philippines, and of course perpetual tension with Taiwan, he added.”
“The launch is a powerful signal intended to intimidate everyone,” he added.
A US-based defense analyst, John Ridge said China could have conducted the test as a form of “posturing or signaling to the United States.”
While Beijing’s tensions with Washington have eased somewhat over the past year, China’s bolder attitude in the region is the stumbling block.
China and the Philippines have intensified conflict in contested waters after the vessels of the two nations have continually crashed into each other. Last month, Japan scrambled fighter jets after it accused a Chinese spy plane of breaching its air space, a move that it called “utterly unacceptable.”
