Hundreds of Indian students facing ‘deportation’ from Canada stage protest
Seoul/Tokyo, North Korea fired a second missile over Japan far out into the Pacific Ocean on Friday, South Korean and Japanese officials said, deepening tension after Pyongyang’s recent test of its sixth and most powerful nuclear bomb.
The missile flew over Hokkaido in the north and landed in the Pacific about 2,000 km to the east, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said.
The missile reached an altitude of about 770 km and flew for about 19 minutes over about 3,700 km, according to South Korea’s military, far enough to reach the US Pacific territory of Guam, which the North has threatened before.
On August 29, North Korea launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Hwasong-12, which travelled 2,700 km over Japan.
“The range of this test was significant since North Korea demonstrated that it could reach Guam with this missile,” the Union of Concerned Scientists said in a statement.
But it said the accuracy of the missile, still at an early stage of development, was low. Warning announcements about the missile blared around 7 am (2200 GMT Thursday) in parts of northern Japan, while many residents received alerts on their mobile phones or saw warnings on TV telling them to seek refuge.
The UN Security Council will meet to discuss the launch at the request of the United States and Japan, diplomats said.
US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said the launch “put millions of Japanese into duck and cover”, although residents of northern Japan appeared calm and went about their business as normal after the second such launch in less than a month.
The US military said soon after the launch it had detected a single intermediate range ballistic missile but the missile did not pose a threat to North America or Guam, which lies 3,400 km from North Korea.
US officials repeated Washington’s “ironclad” commitments to the defence of its allies. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called for “new measures” against North Korea and said the “continued provocations only deepen North Korea’s diplomatic and economic isolation”.
A poll by Gallup Analytics suggested a majority of Americans appeared ready to support military action against North Korea, at least as a last resort. Some 58 per cent said they would favour taking military action if economic and diplomatic efforts failed to achieve US goals.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in said dialogue with the North was impossible at this point. He ordered officials to analyse and prepare for possible new North Korean threats, including electromagnetic pulse and biochemical attacks, a spokesman said. Russia said the missile test was part of a series of unacceptable provocations and that the UN Security Council was united in believing such launches should not be taking place.
US President Donald Trump had been briefed on the latest launch, the White House said. Trump has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the US with a nuclear-tipped missile, but has also asked China to do more to rein in its neighbour. China in turn favours an international response to the problem.
The US wants to exhaust every diplomatic option on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes, and to see loopholes in the North Korean sanctions regime closed, US disarmament ambassador Robert Wood said. — Reuters.
