North Korea has fired ballistic missile, say reports in South Korea

North Korea has conducted a night test of an unidentified ballistic missile which flew over Japan and landed in the Pacific Ocean, bringing a return to high tension to the region after a lull of more than two months.

The type and range of the North Korean missile was not immediately clear, but initial reports from Seoul suggested that it came from a mobile launcher, and was fired at 3 am local time. The mobile night launch appeared aimed at testing new capabilities and demonstrating that Pyongyang would be able to strike back to any attempt at a preventative strike against the regime.

The Japanese broadcaster “The missile flew over Japan’s northern main island of

Hokkaido and fell into the Pacific Ocean,” reports Japanese news outlet, NHK. First unconfirmed reports suggested that the flight time could have been as long as 50 minutes, which would be a record for a North Korean missile test.

Within minutes of the launch, the South Korean joint chiefs of staff announced Seoul had carried out an exercise involving the launch of a “precision strike” missile, signaling that it was primed to respond immediately to any attack from the north.

It was the first North Korean ballistic missile test since September 15, ending a pause that has been the norm in Autumn. It follows a warning earlier this month from Donald Trump that North Korean threats to strike the US and its allies would be a “fatal miscalculation.”

“This a very different administration than the United States has had in the past. Do not underestimate us. And do not try us,” Trump said in a speech to the South Korean national assembly.

The launch also marked a rebuff to Russia which had claimed the previous day that the pause in missile launches suggested that Pyongyang was ready to defuse tensions in line with a proposal from Moscow and Beijing that North Korea could freeze missile and nuclear tests in exchange for a scaling down of US and allied military exercises.

“I think North Korea’s restraint for the past two months is within the simultaneous freeze road map” the deputy Russian foreign minister, Igor Morgulov, told reporters in Seoul on Monday.

“It’s still too early to tell what they tested,” Vipin Narang, an expert on the North Korean nuclear programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. “If it was a new variant, that would be more significant. Otherwise, a nighttime launch is a big part of a testing and training sequence, preparing units for realistic response scenarios on both sides: survivability measures on the DPRK side, and quick reaction from the ROK [South Korean] side.

Mira Rapp-Hooper, an expert on Asia-Pacific security at Yale Law School and the Centre for a New American Security said that the night launch “matters because that’s when they’d launch under operational conditions.

“The mobile launcher matters because it means their missile capability is increasingly survivable— we can’t threaten to take out a missile on a launchpad if there is no launch pad and we don’t know where it’s coming from,” Rapp-Hooper said.

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