NKorea claims success in submarine-launched missile test

North Korea usually responds to regular South Korea-U.S. military drills with weapons tests and fiery warlike rhetoric.

People pass by a TV news program showing a file footage of North Korea’s ballistic missile that the North claimed to have launched from underwater, at Seoul Railway station in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2016. Nor. It has also ramped up its saber-rattling after the US and South Korea reached an agreement to implement a missile-defense system in the South.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un considers Wednesday’s test firing of a submarine-based ballistic missile the “greatest success and victory”, the country’s state-run news agency reported.

The foreign ministers of China, Japan and South Korea criticised North Korea’s latest submarine missile test today during their annual talks that were held amid lingering frictions over territorial disputes and wartime history.

Left: a ballistic missile takes off from a submarine in waters off the eastern port city of Sinpo on Wednesday morning. “Those threats are coming closer each moment”.

“We have confirmed that we will urge North Korea to exercise self-restraint regarding its provocative action, and to observe the UN Security Council’s resolutions”, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida told a news conference after hosting the meeting with his Chinese and South Korean counterparts.

“Through the test results [North Korea] has become a premier military power with flawless nuclear strike capability”, Kim reportedly said.

Earlier, North Korea had called for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, citing an “unprecedentedly unstable” situation on the Korean Peninsula due to the recently announced deployment of THAAD missile systems in South Korea and the “introduction of nuclear strategic bombers” there.

Peter Wilson, Britain’s deputy United Nations ambassador, said this was the fourth missile launch where “something has not been agreed” to by the Security Council in response.

Kim said the latest launch proved the North had joined the “front rank of the military powers fully equipped with nuclear attack capability”.

The military has also clearly been trying to advance its ballistic missile program, conducting a series of land- and sea-based tests over the a year ago. It flew an estimated 310 miles toward the seas around Japan, the longest distance it has yet achieved in a submarine launch.

Most of those efforts were considered failures, including two other SLBMs, and analysts say the North is years away from developing a nuclear weapon that could reach the US mainland.

Relations between the three big Asian economies are often hard, with the legacy of Japan’s wartime aggression affecting its ties with China and South Korea, territorial disputes hurting links between Japan and China, and Japan and South Korea, and China suspicious of the others’ USA ties.

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida said the missile launch “simply can not be tolerated”, while Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told reporters on Wednesday that this provocation is “difficult to forgive”.

He said the United States is drafting the text of a press statement “and we will have a look at it”.

Japan said the missile reached its air defence identification zone (ADIZ), the first time for a North Korean missile.

They are estimated to have cost W120 billion, which experts say would have been enough to feed the North’s entire population for two months (US$1=W1,121).

The supreme leader strongly slammed the ongoing military drills jointly carried out by South Korea and the Untied States and threatened to “deal merciless blows with nuclear hammers”, once an opportunity is given.

Strategic Command assessed that the missile flew approximately 300 miles from the coast of North Korea, indicating a moderate-to-high degree of success.