(Bloomberg) — South Korea convened a National Security Council meeting to discuss North Korea’s launch on Sunday of a short-range projectile, according to the presidential office.
North Korea appears to have fired from its multiple rocket launcher this morning, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said in a text message to reporters. The military has been maintaining defense readiness while closely monitoring related developments, it said.
“The NSC participants will closely analyze the details of the projectile in close cooperation with the U.S. and maintain alert over the recent series of North Korea’s missile launches,” presidential spokeswoman Park Kyung-mi said in a statement. “We should also work to prevent a security vacuum during the presidential transition period,” she said.
Concerns have been mounting that North Korea was looking to fire off its first intercontinental ballistic missile in five years after Yonhap News reported this month South Korea and the U.S. have detected signs of an imminent ICBM launch.
On Wednesday, North Korea fired a suspected ballistic missile from an area near Pyongyang’s international airport. South Korea’s military believes the test ended in failure with the missile exploding before reaching an altitude of 20 kilometers (12 miles), Yonhap said.
Read: North Korea Missile ‘Failed’ After Launch, May Have Exploded
The explosions were heard and seen in Pyongyang, NK News reported people in the capital as saying, and was perhaps the country’s biggest mishap since August 2017, when a suspected ballistic missile broke into pieces.
The latest launch comes as the U.S. prepared new penalties against North Korea after determining that a pair of purported satellite launches by Kim Jong Un’s regime in the past few weeks were used to test systems for a long-anticipated new ICBM.
(Updates with text message from Joint Chiefs of Staff)
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