North Korea fired another missile over the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido on Friday morning, just a day after Pyongyang said that Japan “should be sunken into the sea” with a nuclear bomb and that the United States should be “beaten to death” with a stick “fit for a rabid dog.”
This launch came less than two weeks after North Korea exploded what was widely believed to be a hydrogen bomb.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the international community had to unite to punish Kim Jong Un’s regime.
Tillerson said in a statement, naming China and Russia the two veto-wielding members of the Security Council that are also the closest thing to allies that North Korea has.
The launch sparked angry reactions from Tokyo and Seoul.
The missile was launched from the Sunan airfield just north of Pyongyang about 6:30 a.m. local time, South Korea’s.
It flew 2,300 miles over 17 minutes, passing over Hokkaido and landing some 1,200 miles to the east in the Pacific Ocean.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that the international community must “firmly unite to send out a clear message” to Pyongyang. “We need to have North Korea understand that they will have no bright future if they keep going this way”.
South Korea, immediately fired two of its Hyunmoo-II missiles 155 miles into the sea .
The White House said President Trump was briefed on the latest North Korean missile launch by his chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
“We continue to monitor North Korea’s actions closely,” the Pacific Command said in a statement.
In Beijing, Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, told reporters Friday that China opposed the test, but she called the situation on the Korean Peninsula “complicated, sensitive and severe” .
David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said “The range of this test was significant since North Korea demonstrated that it could reach Guam with this missile”.
The U.N. Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions to date against North Korea on Monday, setting limits on its oil imports and banning its textile exports.
The North Korean statement that lashed out at Japan on Thursday also displayed Pyongyang’s anger at what it called the “heinous sanctions resolution.”
The Sept. 3 nuclear test, North Korea’s sixth, is now widely assumed to have been a test of a hydrogen bomb, as Pyongyang claimed in its state propaganda.
The Japanese government estimates that the force of that explosion was 160 kilotons — more than 10 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 — but some analysts have said its yield could have been as much as 250 kilotons.
