SEOUL: South Korean officials said on Thursday that North Korea fired a short-range ballistic missile just a few days before the US and South Korea kick off major joint military drills. North Korea’s KCNA news agency reported hours after that the country’s leader Kim Jong Un also witnessed the test conducted by a military unit ready to reply to actual war. The official news agency did not provide more details.
South Kora-US military exercises
The ties between South Korea and North Korea are at one of their worst levels in decades, with the nuclear-armed N Korea carrying out more tests as S Korea enhances its defense cooperation with the US in reply.
In 2022, Kim Jong Un’s government declared North Korea an “irreparable” nuclear country and vowed to exponentially rise arms production, including strategic nuclear weapons, as Washington looks to shift more assets to the region to defend its ally Seoul.
S Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that Seoul “detected the launch of a short-range ballistic missile from the North’s western city of Nampo at 6:20 pm”.
South Korean officials said that they were analyzing “the possibility that Pyongyang fired multiple short-range missiles “. It added that the South Korean ministry maintains a complete readiness stance while closely cooperating with the United States (US) as they have strengthened vigilance and surveillance.
