North Korea launches ballistic missile after alleged U.S. spy flight

North Korea fired a long-range ballistic missile into its eastern waters on Wednesday, its neighbor said, two days after it threatened “shocking” consequences in protest of provocative U.S. surveillance near its territory.

South Korea’s military detected a long-range missile fired from North Korea’s capital region around 10 a.m., South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. The South Korean military has stepped up its surveillance posture and maintained a state of combat readiness in close coordination with the United States, the report said.

Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada told reporters that North Korea’s missiles were likely launched along high ballistic trajectories, at a steep angle that North Korea typically uses to avoid neighbors when testing long-range missiles.

Hamada said the missile was expected to land in the sea about 550 kilometers (340 miles) east of the coast of the Korean peninsula outside Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

North Korea’s long-range missile program targets continental U.S. Since 2017, North Korea has conducted a series of intercontinental ballistic missile launches as part of its efforts to acquire nuclear-tipped weapons capable of striking major U.S. cities. Some experts say North Korea still needs to master some technologies to have an effective nuclear ICBM.

Wednesday’s launch follows North Korea’s most recent long-range missile test in April, when it fired a solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missile, a weapon experts say is harder to detect and intercept than liquid-fuel weapons.

Wednesday’s launch, the first by North Korea in about a month, followed a series of statements earlier this week accusing the United States of flying a military plane close to the North to spy on it.

The United States and South Korea dismissed North Korea’s allegations and urged it to refrain from any hostile actions or remarks.

Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea’s younger sister Kim Jong Un, warned the U.S. of the “shocking incident” in a statement Monday night, claiming that U.S. spy planes flew over North Korea’s eastern exclusive economic zone eight times earlier in the day. She claimed North Korea scrambled warplanes to drive the U.S. plane away.

In another fiery statement on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong said the U.S. military would experience “a very critical flight” if it continued its illegal aerial espionage. The North Korean military separately threatened to shoot down the US spy plane.

“Kim Yo Jong’s belligerent statements targeting the U.S. spy planes are part of a pattern in which North Korea exaggerates external threats to gain domestic support and justify weapons tests,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul. “Pyongyang There are also occasional shows of force to undermine what it perceives as diplomatic coordination against it, in this case the leaders of South Korea and Japan meeting on the sidelines of a NATO summit.”

North Korea has repeatedly made similar threats over alleged U.S. spying, but its latest statement comes amid heightened hostility over a series of missile tests the North conducted earlier this year.