North Korea fired a barrage of 10 ballistic missiles Saturday — the largest single salvo Pyongyang has launched in nearly two years.
The missiles were fired from the Sunan area near Pyongyang and landed in the sea off North Korea’s east coast, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said.
The weapons landed near Japan’s exclusive economic zone, although no damage to planes or ships was reported, according to Japanese Defense Minister Shinjiro Koizumi.
The launch came on Day 6 of Freedom Shield, the annual 11-day US-South Korea exercises designed to rehearse defensive plans against a North Korean attack — including its nuclear threat. The Hermit Kingdom has long treated the drills as a provocation and a rehearsal for invasion.
North Korea blasted the exercises — which are intended to facilitate the transfer of US operational control to South Korean forces — as laying the groundwork for an invasion.
The ballistic missile launches are just the latest in escalating displays of saber-rattling from North Korea’s tyrannical despot, Kim Jong Un.
The dictator viewed a strategic cruise missile test with his teenage daughter — reportedly a 13-year-old named Kim Jun Ae — Wednesday and vowed to maintain a “powerful … nuclear war deterrent.”
He visited his country’s 5,000-ton Choe Hyon warship, and two other ships from the “Choe Hyon Class” destroyer series in early March.
Kim also supervised a test firing of a strategic cruise missile from the Choe Hyon, and boasted about his country’s “offensive capability.”
The North Korean dictator vowed this month to continue building warships and bashed his southern neighbor as his country’s “most hostile enemy” whose destruction “cannot be ruled out,” at the Workers Party of Korea’s ninth annual congress in February.
“Every year during the new five-year plan period, we must build two surface warships of this class or of a higher class,” Kim said.
South Korea’s President Lee Jae Myung and President Trump have both sought to improve diplomatic relations with Pyongyang but have not made any progress.
Trump famously became the first US president to cross the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea in 2019 when he met face to face with Kim.
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