North Korea’s Kim Jong Un oversees ’super-large’ rocket launching drills as tensions escalate

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has overseen firing drills by artillery units in the western region involving “super-large“ multiple rocket launchers, state-run broadcaster KRT reported on Tuesday (March 19). The North’s official news agency KCNA also released still photographs of Kim watching the drills and said they were conducted on Monday (March 18) and were aimed at testing the “real war capabilities“ of 600 millimetre multiple rocket launchers and improving the operators’ combat morale and readiness posture. The report of drills came a day after South Korea and Japan reported North Korea’s launch of several short-range ballistic missiles into the sea, its first such missile test in about two months. Kim called for modernising and scaling up artillery forces, highlighting the rocket launchers’ “strategic duties as the core central striking means“ in war preparations. Pyongyang has broken with decades of its inter-Korean policy, scrapping