North Korea fires missiles a day after drills with the US and Japan end
Seoul's Joint Chiefs detected several ballistic missiles launched from Wonsan at 5.20am on Saturday, flying about 250km. US Pacific Command said there was no immediate threat.
North Korea fired ballistic missiles towards the sea off its eastern coast on Saturday morning, a day after South Korea concluded five days of joint maritime drills with the United States and Japan focused on the North.
South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected several missiles launched from the eastern coastal area of Wonsan at about 5.20am on Saturday, 20:20 GMT on Friday. They flew about 250 kilometres.
The immediate response
The Joint Chiefs said it was closely exchanging information on the launches with the United States and Japan — the standard trilateral mechanism, and the one the drills that had just ended were designed to exercise.
South Korea's presidential National Security Office held an emergency security meeting with the Defence Ministry, the Joint Chiefs and other relevant agencies following the launch.
US Pacific Command said the launch event did not pose an immediate threat to US territory or to its allies, adding that Washington remains committed to the defence of South Korea and its other allies in the region.
The missiles fell into the sea off the eastern coast, and US Pacific Command said they posed no immediate threat to US territory or to allies.
What preceded it
The timing follows a pattern that has held for years. Pyongyang has long condemned joint US–South Korean exercises as rehearsals for invasion, and has often staged missile launches around them.
Hours after this week's exercises began on Monday, North Korea's defence minister Kim Song Gi criticised them and warned the country was capable of taking "strong and reflective countermeasures from the standpoint of power".
Late last month, the North had described plans for the Freedom Edge exercises in international waters off South Korea as a threat to Pyongyang and to other countries in the region.
The August launches
This is not the first such response this year. North Korea fired a barrage of missiles into the sea on 20 August, during a shortened edition of the annual Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises held by South Korea and the United States.
That launch came despite an overture from US President Donald Trump, who said he planned to meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Un this year.
The scaled-back drills
The August exercises were shortened following an order from Trump to scale them back. He described the exercises as inappropriate and hostile towards North Korea.
The order alarmed US allies in the region, who read the annual drills as the principal mechanism for maintaining combined readiness on the peninsula.
The sequence since is worth setting out plainly: the exercises were reduced, the North launched missiles anyway in August, a further round of trilateral maritime drills went ahead this week, and the North launched again on Saturday.
What the pattern suggests
Scaling back the drills has not, on this evidence, changed the response to them. The August launch followed a shortened exercise; Saturday's followed a five-day maritime one.
That leaves the question of what the launches are calibrated to. Pyongyang's stated rationale is the exercises themselves, and the defence minister's warning on Monday tied the two together explicitly. The counter-reading — that the launches follow a testing schedule of their own and the exercises supply the occasion — is not something the public record settles either way.
Where the diplomacy stands
Trump's stated intention to meet Kim Jong Un this year remains on the table as far as the public record goes. No meeting has been announced, and the missile launches have not been said by Washington to affect that intention.
South Korea's response on Saturday was procedural rather than escalatory: an emergency meeting of the security agencies, and information-sharing with the two allies whose forces had just finished exercising alongside its own.
The report was carried by Al Jazeera with AFP, Reuters and The Associated Press.
