North Korea fires long-range missile just 200km off Japan
US’s Harris, world leaders condemn action at emergency meeting on sidelines of APEC summit
North Korea test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) yesterday that Japanese officials said had sufficient range to reach the mainland of the US and which landed just 200km off Japan.
The launch, reported by both South Korean and Japanese officials, comes a day after a smaller missile launch by the North and its warning of “fiercer military responses” to the US boosting its regional security presence.
US vice-president Kamala Harris and leaders of Japan, South Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand condemned the launch at an emergency meeting called on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit yesterday.
“We strongly condemn these actions and we again call for North Korea to stop further unlawful, destabilising acts,” Harris said during the meeting, convened to discuss the launch.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida warned of further missile launches by the North and a possible nuclear test, the Japanese government said in a statement.
Harris is in Thailand for the APEC summit, amid heightened geopolitical tensions over the war in Ukraine and other flashpoints such as Taiwan and the Korean peninsula.
Yesterday’s launch adds to a record-breaking year for North Korea’s missile programme, after it resumed testing ICBMs for the first time since 2017, and broke its selfimposed moratorium on long-range launches as denuclearisation talks stalled.
“Pyongyang is trying to disrupt international co-operation against it by escalating military tensions and suggesting it has the capability of holding US cities at risk of nuclear attack,” Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, said.
North Korea’s stepped-up development and testing of missiles also indicates that, despite its dire poverty and sanctions by the UN as well as the US and other nations, it has faced few hurdles obtaining the technology and materials it needs for its missile programme. The South Korean military said that, in response to yesterday’s launch, South Korean F-35A fighters and US F-16 jets flew in formation off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula and conducted a firing drill against targets that simulated North Korea’s mobile missile launchers.
Japanese defence minister Yasukazu Hamada said yesterday that the missile was capable of flying as far as 15,000km, while chief cabinet secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said it flew to an altitude of about 6,000km with a range of 1,000km before landing in the sea about 200km west of Oshima-Oshima Island in Hokkaido.
South Korea’s military projected that the missile reached an altitude of 6,100km and flew 1,000km at a maximum speed of Mach 22. Misawa Airbase, which hosts both Japanese and US troops, briefly issued an order to seek cover, according to a post on the base’s Facebook page.
Kishida said there had been no reports of damage but the North’s repeated missile launches could not be tolerated.