SEOUL (THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK)
During the Korean War, the US Air Force and Navy carried out a massive bombardment campaign against North Korea's capital Pyongyang that lasted for almost three years.
By the end of the war, when an armistice was signed in 1953, the city was virtually flattened with about 75 per cent of it destroyed.
Since then, the communist country has made efforts to build one of the world's most dense air defence networks. A multilayered air defence structure has been constructed around Pyongyang, the North's coastal corridors and its cross-border regions.
But the North's air defence capability was recently thrown into question when its radar appeared to fail to detect US supersonic B-1B bombers that conducted a flyover farthest north of the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) than any US aircraft has flown off the North's coast this century.
"To put it simply, there were no reactions at all from North Korea when the B-1B bombers entered the area," said Mr Lee Chul Woo of the main opposition Liberty Party of Korea, who was briefed on the matter by Seoul's spy agency National Intelligence Service on Tuesday (Sept 26).
"It seems that North Korea wasn't able to take any measures because it didn't anticipate the flyover, which took place around midnight, and its radar failed to capture a strong signal," Mr Lee added after the closed-door briefing.
Theoretically, North Korea's early-warning radar is capable enough to capture incoming aircraft approaching its territory. With a range of up to 600km, the P-14 Tall King radar can detect aircraft when they cross the area between Jeju Island and the Japanese main island of Kyushu.
The two B-1B lancers - escorted by F-15 fighters - reportedly conducted aerial manoeuvres about 300km to 350km away from North Korea's port city of Wonsan, where the P-14 Tall King radar is deployed near North Korea's long-range SA-5 surface-to-air missile system.
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/why-north-korea-fails-to-detect-us-bombers-that-fly-near-the-dmz
