North Korea Fires About 10 Ballistic Missiles Into The Sea Off Its East Coast

SEOUL — North Korea fired around 10 ballistic missiles toward the sea off its east coast on Thursday, South Korea’s military said, as tensions run high ahead of Pyongyang’s end-of-month deadline to activate propaganda loudspeakers along the heavily armed border. The short-range missiles were launched at around 12:30 p.m. local time (0330 GMT) from around Wonsan, on North Korea’s eastern coast, and flew about 250 kilometres (155 miles), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. It was North Korea’s third ballistic missile launch this month.

The Response In Seoul And Tokyo

South Korea was strengthening surveillance and maintaining readiness for additional launches, while closely sharing information with the United States and Japan, the Joint Chiefs said. Japan’s Defense Ministry said North Korea had launched what could be a ballistic missile and that it did not appear to have landed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone. South Korea’s presidential National Security Office convened an emergency meeting to assess the security implications, and urged North Korea to halt its repeated ballistic missile launches, calling them a “serious violation” of UN Security Council resolutions, a presidential statement said. South Korean and US intelligence officials are analysing the projectiles’ precise specifications; Korean reporting suggested the possibility that they were 600mm super-large multiple rocket launchers, a system North Korea counts among its short-range ballistic arsenal.

A Border Row, Six Weeks Old

The launch came as tensions along the inter-Korean border have risen sharply since two mine explosions in the Demilitarized Zone on September 21 wounded three South Korean soldiers. Seoul has accused North Korea of planting mines south of the military demarcation line and demanded an apology; Pyongyang has denied responsibility for the explosions and warned of retaliation if provoked. In the days before Thursday’s launch, North Korea had threatened to resume front-line propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts and deploy new weapons along the rivals’ tense border, and set an end-of-month deadline to switch the loudspeakers back on — a tactic from earlier eras of inter-Korean confrontation that South Korea has also used in the past.

Days After Kim’s Trip To China

The launches also followed leader Kim Jong Un’s surprise weekend visit to China, the North’s main ally and economic lifeline, to push for greater cooperation, the Associated Press reported. Analysts read the barrage as a message aimed in several directions at once. “The launch can be linked to the tensions along the border as part of a broader series of North Korean shows of force, although it is difficult to say the border situation directly prompted the missile launch,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Seoul’s Dongguk University, adding that the launch also appeared intended to demonstrate North Korea’s increasingly advanced ballistic missile capabilities to the US, Japan and the broader international community.

Sources: Reuters; The Associated Press — reporting of October 29, 2026.