South Korea’s defense ministry said the missiles were speculated to be Rodong missiles with a range of 1,000 kilometres (620 miles), and that they were fired without navigational warning to Japan.
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A Joint Chiefs of Staff statement described the launches as an “armed protest” meant to demonstrate North Korea’s military capability on the occasion of the G-20 summit and days before the North Korean government’s 68th anniversary.
Melissa Hanham, an expert on North Korea’s weapons programme at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California, said it was hard to determine so far if there had been any technical progress.
North Korea launched the missiles, believed to be Rodongs, from a site south of Pyongyang at 12:14 pm local time, South Korea’s military said.
In January, North Korea said it had successfully detonated a hydrogen bomb, its fourth nuclear test, and vowed to build up its nuclear program as deterrence against potential aggression from the U.S. and its regional allies. The defence ministry in Tokyo said the three missiles were estimated to have fallen into Japan’s maritime Exclusive Economic Zone.
Top leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) Kim Jong Un has guided the test-firing of ballistic rockets by the strategic force, the official news agency KCNA reported Tuesday.
Earlier, South Korea announced that the North had fired three ballistic missiles from a western region in the capital Pyongyang into the Sea of Japan, as world leaders from G20 nations are in the Chinese town of Hangzhou.
Moreover, the United States recently agreed to deploy the THAAD missile defense system in South Korea, a move that both China and Russian Federation have criticized.
China is North Korea’s only major ally, but ties between the neighbours have frayed amid a number of nuclear and missile tests and what many outsiders see as other provocations in recent years.
The submarine-based ballistic missile launch last month prompted even sharper expressions of concern.
The isolated country has launched a series of missiles this year in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions. President Barack Obama was to head to Laos on Monday evening.
The objective of the latest missile drill was “to reexamine the reliability such as the flight security and guided accuracy of the improved ballistic rockets deployed for action”, the KCNA report reads.
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Pyongyang has conducted a fourth nuclear test and a series of missile tests this year in defiance of United Nations sanctions, prompting Seoul to announce plans to deploy a U.S. anti-missile system to counter such threats. Submarine-based missiles could potentially put more of South Korea and Japan within the North’s missile range and are harder than land-based missiles to detect before launch. It called them “grave violations” of a ban on all ballistic missile activity.
