North Korean missile tests angers Japan

Seoul and Washington launched annual joint military exercises last week that regularly infuriate Pyongyang, which condemns them as provocative rehearsals for invasion. Monday’s test marks the second such firing of 2017.

It was not immediately clear the exact type of missile fired, but the tests will be viewed as a provocation by the Trump administration, which is working on its policy for North Korea.

Japanese officials said three of the four missiles landed in the offshore area where Tokyo has sovereign rights for exploring and exploiting resources. Therefore, the ballistic missile testing and alleged coded messages sent by North Korea will likely be taken very seriously.

The South and the USA are planning to hold the joint military exercise Key Resolve, which South Korea’s military claims is one of the largest ever, this month.

The issue has prompted USA national security officials to consider mounting pre-emptive strikes on North Korean launch sites to thwart the program, the New York Times reported Saturday. The allies claim the drills are defensive and routine.

OPINION: Will there be a Korean war under Trump’s presidency? . Last month, China took the significant step of banning coal imports from North Korea for the rest of the year as part of United Nations sanctions over its missile program, severing an important economic lifeline for Pyongyang. He could launch airstrikes against North Korean nuclear facilities, though it’s far from certain such an assault would destroy all that it needs to in order to erase the country’s nuclear capabilities. “We can never tolerate this”.

“It seems like the North lowered the angle to aim longer in distance this time as part of its attempts to test it in various ways”, Kim Young-woo said by telephone.

“Kim Hyun-bin Arirang News”. The F-35 is capable of carrying out precision strikes without being detected by North Korea’s air defense network. Japan plans to reinforce its ballistic missile defenses and is considering either buying THAAD or building a ground-based version of the Aegis system that is deployed on ships in the Sea of Japan. So, according to a Saturday report by The New York Times, Obama ramped up American cyber-attacks on North Korean computer networks.

China is anxious the system’s radar may be used by the USA to spy on its military development.

Here’s what we know about Monday’s launches.

Significantly Russia’s warnings against a “rise in tension”, in Peskov’s words, came after tensions between the Kremlin and the West heated up, too.

But at a daily news briefing, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang encouraged prudence from both sides.

Weapons experts say solid-fuel missiles pose greater threats as they require less launch preparation time than liquid-fueled rockets, and can be fired from mobile launchers, which are easy to move around.

Meanwhile, South Korean National Security Adviser Kim Kwan-jin and his counterpart General Herbert Raymond McMaster spoke over the phone for 15 minutes at 1045 KST, the ROK presidential office said in a written statement.