North Korea launched on Monday, the 12th, several ballistic missiles toward the waters to the east of the country, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said, broadening the recent sequence of weapons tests amid the freezing of diplomatic talks.
According to South Korean military spokesman Jang Do-young, the launches involved different types of missiles and originated from an area near Pyongyang, where the country’s main airport has been used as a launch platform in recent years. Jang said that one of the missiles flew more than 900 kilometers before landing at sea, without detailing the performance of the others. Seoul did not report how many projectiles were detected.
In Japan, Deputy Defense Minister Takashi Koyari said the country identified at least two missiles, fired 17 minutes apart, that fell outside the Japanese exclusive economic zone. According to him, the first traveled about 220 kilometers and the second, more than 910 kilometers, following an “irregular” trajectory, a term already used by Japanese authorities to describe hypersonic weapons. There were no reports of damage to aircraft or vessels.
Pyongyang has stepped up tests to widen its arsenal of systems with nuclear-capable capacity. On October 3, the regime said it had tested a hypersonic missile of intermediate range designed to circumvent South Korean and Japanese missile defenses. The country also conducted live-fire exercises and put into operation a new warship, while the leader Kim Jong Un rejects offers from the United States and South Korea to resume talks stalled for years.
The new launch came days after Seoul tested, on Friday, an internally developed hypersonic weapon. The South Korean president, Lee Jae Myung, stated that the project is crucial for strengthening the country’s conventional defense capabilities. Lee’s office said that once completed, the weapon would increase South Korea’s ability to hit strategic targets of surprise in the “theater of operations on the Korean Peninsula.”
Jang assessed that the North Korean launches may have aimed to advance missile technologies and also serve as a response to the South Korean hypersonic test.
The South Korean National Security Council’s presidential office urged the North to “immediately stop” the repeated ballistic launches, which violate United Nations Security Council resolutions and “do not help manage the current situation on the Korean Peninsula.” Koyari said Japan lodged a protest to North Korea through its embassies in Beijing.
The tensions had already risen last month after three South Korean soldiers were injured in mine explosions near the inter-Korean border. South Korean military forces and the United Nations Command, led by the United States, attributed the incident to devices installed by North Korea, which denied responsibility.
In recent years, Kim has halted diplomacy with Seoul and labeled the neighbor as a permanent enemy, amid the stalemate in nuclear talks with Washington. Pyongyang has also, so far, rejected calls by U.S. President Donald Trump to resume dialogue, broken off in 2019, demanding that Washington abandon what it calls a “hostile” policy and remove denuclearization as a precondition for talks.
*Content translated with the aid of Artificial Intelligence, reviewed and edited by the Editorial Team of the Broadcast, the real-time news system of Grupo Estado
