North Korea fired a ballistic missile toward the sea on Wednesday, South Korea said, hours before the country’s next large-scale military drills with the U.S. were due to start. South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected the launch from North Korea’s eastern coastal Wonsan area toward the North’s eastern waters around 6 a.m.
Japan’s Defense Ministry also reported a suspected ballistic missile launch and said it did not detect the weapon reaching Japan’s exclusive economic zone. That mattered because the launch came just as Seoul and Washington were preparing the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise, an 11-day run set to begin Monday with 18,000 South Korean soldiers taking part.
The timing fits a pattern North Korea has followed for years. After Kim Jong Un’s high-stakes diplomacy with Donald Trump collapsed in 2019, North Korea kept up a run of weapons tests, and it has often answered South Korea-U.S. military exercises with launches and sharp warnings. This time, the message landed two days after Seoul and Washington announced the drills would begin next week.
That leaves the familiar dispute in place. North Korea sees the drills as an invasion rehearsal, while the U.S. and South Korea describe their training as defensive. The last reported launch before Wednesday came on Aug. 6, when South Korea, the U.S. and Japan detected a short-range ballistic missile, though North Korea did not confirm that launch.
What is missing now is the one detail that would make the launch easier to judge: what type of missile North Korea fired on Wednesday and how far it traveled before falling. With the drills set to start Monday, South Korea, Washington and Tokyo are likely to watch closely for whether Pyongyang treats the exercise window as an opening for more testing, as it has done before.
