The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Wednesday fired the sixth suspected Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missile, the second in the day, after the fifth test-launch had failed, Yonhap news agency reported citing military authorities.
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Officials with South Korea’s Defense Ministry said earlier that Pyongyang had conducted a failed launch, with the missile falling into the Sea of Japan.
The second, launched hours later, flew about 400km.
Haggard says nuclear weapons give North Korea’s Kim Jung Un leverage to bargain with the rest of the world.
The order was an apparent response to US-South Korean military drills, which North Korea views as an invasion rehearsal.
North Korea’s latest missile test will likely be addressed at a closed-door regional security forum now underway in Beijing that includes diplomats from North Korea, the US and South Korea.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe condemned the launch in a press briefing Wednesday morning. Military officials in the South said both were intermediate-range Musudan missiles.
The failures to date have been notable, but North Korea’s scientists acquire valuable new information with each test gone wrong, getting closer to their goal of attaining a credible capability to strike US territory. The military says it presumes that launch was a failure.
The U.N. Security Council, backed by the North’s main diplomatic ally, China, imposed tough new sanctions in March after the isolated state conducted its fourth nuclear test in January and launched a long-range rocket that put an object into space orbit.
One was displayed during a military parade in 2010 in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, but it had never been flight-tested before three attempts in April and one on May 31.
The proposal was repeated several times by the North s military, but Seoul dismissed all the overtures as insincere “posturing” given Kim s vow at the same congress to push ahead with the country s nuclear weapons programme.
United Nations resolutions ban North Korea from any use of ballistic missile technology, although it regularly fires short-range missiles into the sea off its east coast.
A Japanese defence ministry spokesman said it had reached an altitude of 1,000 kilometres and “exhibited a certain functionality”.
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The Korean Peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. About 28,500 USA soldiers are stationed in South Korea to deter possible aggression from North Korea.
