South Korea says North Korea has fired a ballistic missile off its east coast and it may have fallen inside Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone.
South Korea’s military says the North Korean launch happened on Thursday evening and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation says it is believed to have fallen inside Japan's EEZ.
The launch came after North Korea's military vowed an unspecified response after South Korean and US troops finished five rounds of large-scale live-fire drills near Korea’s heavily fortified border earlier today.
The US has recently been doing joint drills with South Korea, to counter the growing threat of leader Kim Jomg-Un's growing nuclear arsenal.
The exercises were the fifth and last round of South Korean-US firing drills that began last month. This year's drills were the biggest of their kind since they began in 1977.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry previously urged North Korea to stop raising tensions with "reckless nuclear and missile programs and military provocations."
"Our response to (the South Korean-US drills) is inevitable," an unidentified spokesperson of the North Korean Defence Ministry said in a statement carried by state media.
There are currently few details about what missile was launched today, but in April North Korea said it tested a new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile which was its "most powerful" missile to date.
Brute leader Jong-Un was quoted at the time by state media as saying he would continue to expand his nuclear arsenal so that his adversaries would "suffer from extreme anxiety and fear while facing an insurmountable threat."
He said the test would "constantly strike extreme uneasiness and horror into them by taking fatal and offensive counteractions until they abandon their senseless thinking and reckless acts."
