Yahoo Finance North Korea launches missile into the sea
North Korea launched a short-range missile on Tuesday morning, just as Pyongyang’s ambassador to the United Nations demanded the United States withdraw its strategic weapons from around the Korean Peninsula and respect his country’s right to self defence.
At least one projectile was fired into the sea off the North’s east coast, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff reported, adding that it was launched from an inland area eastward at around 6.40am local time.
Seoul said it was monitoring the situation and did not confirm whether the test was a ballistic missile, which is banned under United Nations security resolutions, but Yoshihide Suga, Japan’s prime minister, said North Korea had fired “what could be a ballistic missile”.
The US Indo-Pacific Command said that while the launch did not pose an immediate threat to US personnel or territory, that it "highlights the destabilising impact of (North Korea's) illicit weapons programme."
The timing of the launch coincided with a speech by Kim Song, the North Korean ambassador to the UN, to the General Assembly in New York, during which he justified the build up of Pyongyang’s deterrent against the “hostile acts” of the United States.
“We are just building up our national defence in order to defend ourselves and reliably safeguard the security and peace of the country,” he said, denouncing the US troop presence in the South and Washington’s ongoing military drills with Seoul as “double standards”.
He said that given the US and South Korean “military threats” against North Korea, nobody could deny it the right to “develop, test, manufacture and possess” equivalent weapons systems.
Tuesday’s test-fire came just three days after Kim Yo-jong,the influential sister of leader Kim Jong-un, publicly acknowledged that peace talks between the North and South could be resumed, and that an agreement on a “timely declaration” of the end of the Korean War could be on the table.
The conflict, which split the peninsula into two, ended in 1953 with an armistice and not a peace treaty, leaving the two countries technically at war for decades.
Last week, Moon Jae-in, the South Korean president, called for the two Koreas and their allies – the US which backs the South, and China, which is Pyongyang’s biggest trading partner - to declare a formal end to the conflict.
His statement was initially rejected by Pyongyang as “premature” but Ms Kim later indicated negotiations could resume on condition that the South and the US dropped their “double-dealing” attitudes in justifying their own arms build-up while faulting the North’s right to self-defence.
If Tuesday’s test is confirmed to be a ballistic missile, it would mark the third such launch so far this year, and the sixth known major weapons test, including the firing of a new long-range cruise missile that experts believe could have nuclear capabilities.
The North’s state media called the missile a “strategic weapon of great significance”.
Days later, it tested a new railway-borne missile system, designed as a potential counter-strike to any threatening forces.
Pyongyang has also lashed out at Seoul’s own missile tests. Earlier this month, South Korea successfully tested a submarine-launched ballistic missile, becoming the first country without nuclear weapons to develop such a system.
