North Korea ups sabre-rattling by firing suspected intercontinental ballistic missile that can hit US

The missile, designed to carry a nuclear warhead as far as any location in the continental US, landed just 200km off Japan

The launch comes a day after Pyongyang warned of ‘fiercer military responses’ to Washington’s moves to boost its military presence in the region

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This year North Korea has conducted a record number of ballistic missile tests. File photo: KCNA/KNS via AP

Published: 10:38am, 18 Nov 2022Updated: 3:49pm, 18 Nov 2022

North Korea fired a suspected intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Friday that landed just 200km (130 miles) off Japan and had sufficient range to reach the mainland of the United States, Japanese officials said.

The testing, reported by both South Korean and Japanese officials, comes a day after a smaller missile launch by the North and its warning of “fiercer military responses” to the US boosting its regional security presence.

This has become a record-breaking year for the nuclear-armed country’s missile programme, after it resumed testing ICBMs for the first time since 2017 and broke its self-imposed moratorium on long-range launches as denuclearisation talks stalled.

Japanese Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada told reporters the latest missile was capable of flying as far as 15,000km, while Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno said it flew to an altitude of about 6,000km with a range of 1,000km, before landing in the sea roughly 200km west of Oshima-Oshima Island in Hokkaido.

North Korea often conducts its tests on such “lofted” trajectories where the missile flies much higher into space but to a shorter distance than it would if fired on a normal trajectory.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said there had been no reports of damage but the North’s repeated missile launches could not be tolerated.