On Sunday evening, North Korea fired two ballistic missiles into the sea, Seoul’s military confirmed, becoming the seventh such launch over the last two weeks.
Africa Today News, New York reports that this came barely hours after a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier concluded joint drills off the Korean peninsula.
Presently, Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington have ramped up combined naval exercises in recent weeks, infuriating Pyongyang which sees them as rehearsals for invasion and justifies its blitz of missile launches as necessary ‘countermeasures’.
With talks long-stalled, Pyongyang has doubled down on its banned weapons programmes, firing an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan last week, with officials and analysts warning it has completed preparations for another nuclear test.
South Korea’s military said Sunday it had ‘detected two short-range ballistic missiles between 0148 and 0158 (1648-1658 GMT) fired from the Munchon area in Kangwon province towards the East Sea’, also known as the Sea of Japan.
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The missiles “flew approximately 350 kilometres (217 miles) at an altitude of 90 kilometres”, Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement, calling the launches a ‘serious provocation’.
Tokyo also confirmed the launches, with the coast guard saying the missiles had landed outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.
Japanese senior vice defence minister Toshiro Ino said Tokyo was analysing the missiles, adding that ‘either one of them has the possibility of being a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM)’.
Seoul said last month it had detected signs the North was preparing to fire an SLBM, a weapon Pyongyang last tested in May.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has rebuffed Washington’s calls for talks and instead chosen to “improve” his ballistic missile program.
‘He’s clearly not abandoned his nuclear weapons ambitions,’ Kirby told ABC News on Sunday.
‘We’re going to make sure that we have the capabilities in place to defend our national security interest if it comes to that. But there’s no reason for it to come to that’ he said, adding the United States was committed to ‘a diplomatic path forward’.
North Korea’s missile tests usually aim to develop new capabilities, but its recent launches, “from different locations at different times of day, may be intended to demonstrate military readiness”, said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.