South Korea claims North Korea fired a “unidentified ballistic missile”

The South Korean military said that North Korea has launched a “unidentified ballistic missile” into the eastern sea.

General Kim Seung-kyum of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed the launch on Thursday but provided no other details.

General Kim Seung-kyum claimed, referring to the body of sea commonly known as the Sea of Japan, that “North Korea fired an unidentified ballistic missile into the East Sea.”

North Korea’s foreign minister, Choe Son Hue, had vowed to launch a “fiercer” missile in retaliation to the US-South Korea-Japan summit agreement on the North.

According to the White House, US President Joe Biden met with his South Korean counterpart Yoon Suk-yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Sunday to explore methods to confront the threat posed by the North’s “unlawful weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes.”

The meeting elicited a vehement reaction from the North, with its foreign minister declaring that it was “bringing the situation on the Korean peninsula to an unpredictable phase.”

“The United States’ bolstered offer of extended deterrence, as well as the daily-increasing military activities of allied forces around the Korean peninsula, are reckless measures,” Choe said in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA.

The rollout on Thursday is thought to have been timed to coincide with the foreign minister’s statement.

In addition, after a wave of missile launches, the US leader spoke with China’s Xi Jinping, pressuring him to utilise his power to restrain North Korea.

In a string of record-breaking launches this month, this is the most recent missile provocation. North Korea staged a series of launches earlier this month, including an intercontinental ballistic missile that Seoul said appeared to have failed.

Pyongyang also launched a short-range ballistic missile that crossed the two nations’ de facto maritime border and landed near the South’s territorial seas for the first time since the Korean War ended in 1953.

It was “essentially a territorial invasion,” President Yoon remarked at the time.

Both missile launches were a part of a bombardment on November 2 in which Pyongyang fired 23 missiles, more than it had done all of 2017, the year of “fire and fury,” during which Kim and then-US President Donald Trump traded insults on Twitter and in official media.