North Korea answers US olive branch with missile launch
South Korea detected 10 ballistic missiles hours after Pyongyang dismissed Washington’s decision to scale back joint exercises with Seoul
North Korea has fired several short-range ballistic missiles, Seoul’s military said on Thursday, hours after US President Donald Trump said he would meet Pyongyang’s Kim Jong-un this year.
Pyongyang has long condemned US-South Korea joint exercises as rehearsals for invasion, often staging missile launches around the drills.
Trump, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with Kim in his first term, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday he planned to meet the North Korean leader later this year.
The US president also said it was important to “get along” with Kim, adding that Pyongyang now had 57 “very powerful” nuclear weapons. Seoul says there are around 80 to 120.
Hours after Trump’s remarks, an official from Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the North fired “around 10 short-range ballistic missiles” from the Pyongyang area towards the East Sea at around 5pm, South Korea’s military said.
Japan earlier said a suspected “ballistic missile launched by North Korea a short while ago has already fallen”, according to a social media post from the prime minister’s office.
Trump’s sudden focus on Kim and his scaling back of joint US-South Korean military drills have alarmed Asian allies, while sparking speculation that he was seeking a foreign policy win as the Iran war stalls.