SEOUL — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, said on Sunday that his country was making final preparations to conduct its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, a bold statement less than a month before the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump.
Although North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests in the past decade and more than 20 ballistic missile tests in 2016 alone, and although it habitually threatens to attack the United States with nuclear weapons, the country has never flight-tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM.
In his annual New Year’s Day speech, which was broadcast on the North’s state-run KCTV on Sunday, Kim spoke proudly of the strides he said his country has made in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
He said that North Korea would continue to bolster its weapons programs as long as the United States remained hostile and continued its joint military exercises with South Korea.
“We have reached the final stage in preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic rocket,’’ he said. He did not give a timetable for the launch. Last year, North Korea conducted a nuclear test on Jan. 6, two days before Kim’s birthday.
Analysts in the region have said Kim might conduct another weapons test in coming months, taking advantage of leadership changes in the United States and South Korea. Trump will be sworn in on Jan. 20.
In South Korea, President Park Geun-hye, whose powers were suspended in a parliamentary impeachment on Dec. 9, is waiting for the Constitutional Court to rule on whether she should be formally removed from office or reinstated.
If North Korea conducts a long-range missile test, it will test Trump’s new administration; despite years of increasingly harsh sanctions, North Korea has been advancing toward Kim’s professed goal of arming his country with the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead at the United States.
Kim’s speech on Sunday indicated that North Korea may test-launch a long-range rocket several times this year to complete its ICBM program, said Cheong Seong-chang, a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute of South Korea. The first of such tests could come even before Trump’s inauguration, Cheong said.
“We need to take note of the fact that this is the first New Year’s speech where Kim Jong Un mentioned an intercontinental ballistic missile,’’ he said.
In his speech, Kim did not comment on Trump’s election.
Doubt runs deep that North Korea has mastered all technology needed to build a reliable ICBM. But analysts in the region said the North’s launchings of three-stage rockets to put satellites into orbit in recent years showed that the country had cleared some key technological hurdles.
After the North’s satellite launch in February, South Korean defense officials said the North’s Unha rocket used in the launch, if successfully reconfigured as a missile, could fly more than 7,400 miles with a warhead of 1,100 to 1,300 pounds, far enough to reach the West Coast of the United States.
North Korea has deployed Rodong ballistic missiles that can reach most of South Korea and Japan, while it has had a spotty record in test-launching the Musudan, its intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range long enough to reach US military bases in the Pacific, including those on Guam.
