N Korea fires missile days before US talks

North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the sea yesterday, South Korea’s military said, in a display of its expanding military capabilities hours after saying it would resume nuclear diplomacy with the United States this weekend.

South Korean officials said the missile was fired from North Korea’s eastern waters, suggesting it may have been submarine-launched. North Korea having the ability to launch missiles from submarines would be alarming because such weapons are harder to detect.

According to Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, the missile flew about 450km at the maximum attitude of 910km before landing between the Korean Peninsula and Japan.

Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga earlier said the North fired two ballistic missiles from the country’s east coast, and one of them appeared to have landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

There were no reports of damage to Japanese vessels or aircraft, he said. The North had not fired a weapon that reached inside Japan’s EEZ since November 2017. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the launches and said they violate UN resolutions against the North.

The launches, which were the North’s ninth round of weapons tests since late July, came hours after a senior North Korean diplomat said North Korea and the United States have agreed to resume working-level nuclear negotiations this weekend.

After supervising a testing firing of what the North described as a “newly developed super-large multiple rocket launcher” last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was quoted by state media as saying that the system would require a “running fire test” to complete its development.

North Korea could also be demonstrating its displeasure over South Korea displaying for the first time some of its newly purchased USmade F-35 stealth fighter jets at its Armed Forces Day ceremony yesterday.

The North has called the F-35 purchases a grave provocation that violate recent inter-Korean agreements aimed at lowering military tensions.

Kim Dong-yub, an analyst from Seoul’s Institute for Far Eastern Studies and a former military official who participated in inter-Korean military talks, said the North’s launch was clearly aimed at increasing pressure on Washington ahead of planned weekend talks where it might demand concessions on US-led sanctions against its crippled economy.

Nuclear negotiations halted following a February summit between Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump in Vietnam that broke down after the US rejected North Korean demands for broad sanctions relief in exchange for partially surrendering its nuclear capabilities.