North Korea conducted a slew of new weapons tests, the state run Korean Central News Agency said, including one involving an electromagnetic weapon system and a carbon fiber bomb.
The tests, which were conducted over three days from Monday to Wednesday, were overseen by General Kim Jong Sik, the KCNA report said.
The weapons tests come at a time of heightened geopolitical uncertainty. Pyongyang has moved closer to Moscow in recent years, supporting Russia's war against Ukraine, and is now looking to bolster ties with Beijing. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is visiting the North from Thursday, his first trip to the neighboring country in more than six years.
Kim said "the electromagnetic weapon and carbon fiber bomb are special assets of strategic nature to be combined with and applied to various military means" in different spheres, the KCNA report said, without giving further details. These weapons use electromagnetic energy rather than explosives to disrupt or damage targets, especially electronics infrastructure.
The report added that there had also been a test "to verify the combat reliability of the mobile short-range anti-aircraft missile system." In addition, the country's Ballistic Missile System Institute and the Warhead Institute of the Missile Administration conducted tests "estimating the combat application and cluster munitions power of tactical ballistic missile warhead," the report said.
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The KCNA report said that the tests had confirmed that one of the country's surface-to-surface tactical ballistic missiles tipped with a cluster bomb warhead was able to "reduce to ashes any target covering an area of 6.5-7 hectares with the highest-density power."
North Korea is banned under successive rafts of UN sanctions from testing ballistic missiles.
On Wednesday, South Korea's military said that the North had launched multiple rounds of ballistic missiles into waters off its east coast.
On Tuesday, the North fired a projectile in what may have been a failed weapons test, Yonhap news agency reported at the time. That projectile flew eastward before showing signs of anomaly early in flight and disappearing, Yonhap said.
The launches took place days after a North Korean statement conveyed leader Kim Jong Un's rare praise for South Korea's President Lee Jae Myung in response to Lee's expression of regret over unauthorized drone flights that crossed the border into the North's airspace.
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