North Korea launched several ballistic missiles into waters off its eastern coast on Monday, according to South Korea’s military. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said one of the projectiles travelled more than 900 km (559 miles) from the Pyongyang area, but did not say how many missiles it had detected in total.
Japan’s coastguard separately said North Korea had fired two unidentified projectiles, which it believed were ballistic missiles and which appeared to have already come down.
Seoul demands an immediate halt to the launches
South Korea’s presidential office said the repeated launches breach United Nations Security Council resolutions, and it urged Pyongyang to stop immediately. The latest firing adds to rising tensions on the peninsula, where both countries have been carrying out weapons tests.
Joint Chiefs spokesperson Jang Do-young described the launch as an apparent show of force, coming after South Korea’s own hypersonic missile test.
Hypersonic test and North Korea’s October launch
On Thursday, President Lee Jae Myung personally oversaw the South’s first test-firing of a hypersonic missile, a rare occasion on which a South Korean president publicly watched a missile test. Lee’s office said that once fully developed, the weapon would improve the country’s ability to hit key targets unexpectedly across the “Korean Peninsula theatre of operations”.
North Korea had itself tested a hypersonic intermediate-range missile on October 3, a weapon designed to get past missile defences in South Korea and Japan.
Landmine dispute stalls efforts to restart talks
Last week, Seoul demanded an apology after a landmine explosion in the Demilitarised Zone wounded three soldiers. A joint South Korean-UN investigation concluded that North Korean forces had planted two mines roughly a year earlier. Pyongyang rejected that finding and accused the South of provocation.
The blast came shortly after Seoul said it was making preliminary efforts to help set up dialogue between North Korea and the United States. President Lee had pledged in his first speech after taking office in 2025 to reopen talks with the North. Kim Jong Un has continued to showcase his nuclear weapons programme while turning down US and South Korean offers to resume stalled diplomacy.
Talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump abruptly ended in 2019. Kim’s government still demands that Washington abandon its hostile policy towards Pyongyang and drop its demand for denuclearisation as a condition for negotiations.
