North Korea calls missile launches this week a warning to South Korea

A day after firing off two short-range ballistic missiles, North Korea said that the launches were a warning to South Korean “warmongers.”

North Korea’s state media reported that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, personally oversaw the test firings of the “newtype tactical guided weapon.”

The missiles, launched from the coastal area of Wonsan, were intended to convey the Kim regime’s displeasure over approaching military exercises in South Korea, the North Korean report said.

In Washington on Thursday, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the door remained open for diplomacy with North Korea despite the launches and that he hoped working-level talks between the two countries would begin in the next month or so.

He described the act as more a negotiating tactic than something that would create a rupture or lead President Donald Trump to reverse his commitment to talks with Kim.

“Everybody tries to get ready for negotiations and create leverage and create risk for the other side,” Pompeo said in an interview Thursday with Bloomberg Television. “We remain convinced that there’s a diplomatic way forward, a negotiated solution to this.”

South Korean officials said the missiles were of a new type and traveled as far as 690 kilometers (430 miles) into the sea between the Korean Peninsula and Japan. The weapons, which officials said flew as high as 50 kilometers, were launched just hours after U.S. national security adviser John Bolton departed Seoul.

The test firing was among a series of steps by Kim that appeared intended to communicate frustration with the U.S. in the wake of his historic June 30 meeting with the American president at the Demilitarized Zone.

Almost a month after Trump and Kim announced working-level talks, negotiating teams have yet to meet and discuss the leaders’ agreement last year to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The two sides have been divided over the scale of disarmament steps offered by Kim and the pace of sanctions relief proposed by the Americans

Pompeo suggested on Thursday that he wasn’t bothered by the delay in working-level talks, saying the two sides needed to have enough conversations to produce “productive dialogue” when they get together.

“President Trump has been incredibly consistent here: We want diplomacy to work,” Pompeo said in the interview. “If it takes another two weeks or four weeks, so be it.”