According to the South Korean military, North Korea fired a new projectile off its eastern coast on Tuesday morning.
This projectile “appears to be a ballistic missile”, according to a spokesperson for the Japanese Ministry of Defense consulted by AFP.
South Korea’s National Security Council met urgently after the shooting. In a statement, he deplored “this launch at a time when political stability in the Korean Peninsula is going through an extremely critical moment.”
This is the third shot made by Pyongyang this month. The first involved a long-range cruise missile, and the second a short-range ballistic missile.
North Korea attacks Americans at the UN
At almost the same time, North Korean Ambassador to the UN, Kim Song, told the UN General Assembly that his country has the “legitimate right” to test weapons and “strengthen (its) defense capabilities ”.
The United States “should prove in practice that it has no hostile will towards us,” continued the ambassador. “If so, we are ready to respond” in the same way, “but it does not appear that the United States is ready” to take that direction, he said. The Americans must “cease their military exercises and stop deploying a strategic panoply against our country”, also demanded Kim Song.
Pyongyang talks with the United States have stalled since the failure of the 2019 Hanoi summit between Kim Jong Un and then-US President Donald Trump.
Ambiguous messages with regard to South Korea
A few days earlier, Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, hinted at the possibility of a summit between the two Koreas, while demanding beforehand that Seoul abandon its “hostile policy”.
These remarks responded to South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s call to declare an official end to the inter-Korean conflict of 1950-1953 which ended in a truce, not a peace treaty.
Since Kim Jong Un took over as head of the country, weapons programs have progressed, but Pyongyang has not carried out any nuclear tests or intercontinental ballistic missile fire since 2017.
