North Korea: Regime's ICBM went more than 2,000 miles into space and was highest yet - as it happened
The missile is one of a number of launches undertaken by Pyongyang this year
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Your support makes all the difference.North Korea has fired a ballistic missile that landed near the Japanese coast.
The missile flew eastward and the South Korean military was analysing details with the US. A Pentagon spokesman that the missile was likely an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and it had travelled about 1,000 km. Japan said the missile had reached a height of 4,000 km, with South Korea saying 4,500 km.
Donald Trump was briefed while the missile was “still in the air”, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe convened a meeting of cabinet officials.
Follow the latest live updates below
Japanese officials had been bracing for an imminent missile launch, saying they had detected suspicious radio signals. North Korea has menaced Japan in recent months, firing a ballistic missile over Hokkaido in September — the second time it hurled a missile over Japan — and warning that the nation should be “sunken into the sea” by a nuclear strike.
The launch marks the latest escalation of a global standoff with an increasingly assertive North Korea. The nuclear-armed hermit state has repeatedly displayed its military prowess in recent months, combining ballistic missile launches with threats of destroying Japan, the United States and the US territory of Guam. It tested a powerful hydrogen bomb for the first time.
Diplomatic constraints have failed to halt North Korea’s belligerence, with the country forging ahead with military tests despite successive rounds of United Nations sanctions targeting the country’s economy.
Mr Trump said the launch did not change the US approach to the issue of North Korea, a week after he put the nation on a US list of countries that Washington says support terrorism.
US Defense Secretary James Mattis - seeming to back-up Japan's assessment - has said that the missile "went higher than any shot [North Korea] have taken".
Mr Mattis also said that the missile launch programme in North Korea poses a "worldwide threat".
The UK Ambassador to the UN, Matthew Rycroft has said that Korth Korea's Kim Jong-un "must change course for the sake of the world".
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Tokyo was requesting an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
"We can never accept this violence and have strongly protested to North Korea," Mr Abe said. He called on all countries to strictly implement sanctions against Pyongyang.
From Reuters: North Korea has said its weapons programme is a necessary defence against US plans to invade. The United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean war, denies any such intention.
S Korean President Moon Jae-in convenes NSC meeting to discuss N Korea's missile launch, according to local media
David Wright, co-director of the global security programme at the Union of Concerned Scientists, tells the Washington Post that the latest launch has for the first time put the US capital in reach
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has issued a statement on the missile launch:
"Diplomatic options remain viable and open, for now. The United States remains committed to finding a peaceful path to denuclearisation and to ending belligerent actions by North Korea," he said
Other than carrying out existing UN. sanctions, "the international community must take additional measures to enhance maritime security, including the right to interdict maritime traffic" traveling to North Korea, Mr Tillerson added.
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