North Korea fired two short-range missiles yesterday, making six launches in three days, and it condemned South Korea for criticising what it said were its legitimate military drills.
There appears to be little prospect of talks between North Korea and the US
South Korea’s Defence Ministry said North Korea had fired one missile yesterday morning and a second one in the afternoon.
Both were fired into the sea off North Korea’s east coast, a ministry official said.
The launches come hard on the heels of more than two months of threats from North Korea that it would wage a nuclear war against South Korea and the United States if it were attacked.
The North condemned joint US and South Korean military exercises, that ended in late April, as a rehearsal for an attack on its territory.
“We are conducting intense military exercises to strengthen our defence capacity,” North Korea’s KCNA news agency quoted the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the body that handles inter-Korean issues, as saying yesterday.
“Our military is conducting these exercises in order to cope with the mounting war measures from the US and South Korea, which is the legitimate right of any sovereign country.”
North Korea frequently fires short-range missiles, although the current spate of launches has drawn criticism from South Korea and the US after the recent threats from the North.
Seoul yesterday condemned the launches for stoking tension in the region while Beijing, the North’s sole major ally, called for restraint.
“These launches are its tactic of signalling to the world that the regime is willing to negotiate now, while at the same time saving face,” Kim Yeon-su, a professor at Korea National Defence University in Seoul, which is part of the Defence Ministry, said of North Korea.
Kim said that North Korea had an arsenal of hundreds of short- and medium-range missiles.
There appears to be little prospect of talks between North Korea and the US as Washington insists that Pyongyang needs to abandon its nuclear weapons programme, something the isolated and impoverished state has said it will not do.
Meanwhile later yesterday the Pentagon appeared to play down North Korea’s six short-range missile launches over the past three days, describing tensions on the Korean peninsula as relatively low.
Speaking about the current situation, Pentagon spokesman George Little acknowledged US concerns that the launches could be construed that way but said: “I’m not ready to make the call yet.”
“A few months ago, we saw underground nuclear tests, we saw long-range missile tests, we saw heated rhetoric,” Little said.
“So I think we can safely say that we remain in a period of tensions that are relatively on a small scale by comparison.”
The comments came the same day the US military announced it would test-fire its Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile on today.