North Korea's deputy foreign minister, Sin Hong-chol, has told Al Jazeera that its army is on "maximum alert" after US Vice President Mike Pence visited the demilitarised zone between the two Koreas on Monday.
Blue huts straddle the border, where tense negotiations have been held between the North, South and the United States since armistice. During a fellowship meal after the services, he said the tensions on the Korean peninsula had put into sharp focus the importance of the joint U.S.
Amid rising tensions with North Korea, Pence pointed to recent high-profile US military actions in Syria and Afghanistan as evidence of the Trump administration's "strength and resolve". "Your willingness to step forward, to serve, to stand firm without fear, inspires the nation and inspires the world".
The timing of the test, coinciding with Pence's trip and a day after the military parade, would suggest deliberate defiance.
The system being installed in South Korea is created to shoot down missiles from North Korea or elsewhere. In 2015 North Korea imported $2.95 billion worth of goods from China, and exported $2.83 billion there, according to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
In a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border.
It's for these reasons that USA military intervention with North Korea has traditionally been seen as a last resort. That led North Korea to issue routine threats of attacks on its rivals if they show signs of aggression.
"We had good intelligence before the launch and good intelligence after the launch", the adviser told reporters on condition of anonymity.
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking to reporters Monday evening, said he hoped there would be "no unilateral actions like those we saw recently in Syria and that the USA will follow the line that President Trump repeatedly voiced during the election campaign".
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In other words, it could be years, if not decades, before Pyongyang may be capable of launching a nuclear missile at a USA target. For Pence's part, he said "peaceable means" - including negotiations - are still ideal, but that "all options are on the table".
"It appears today's launch was already scheduled for re-launching after the earlier test-firing", said Kim Dong-yub, a military expert at Kyungnam University's Institute of Far Eastern Studies in Seoul.
Kim called the news conference to "categorically reject" the U.S. decision to hold an open meeting of the Security Council on April 28 on North Korea's nuclear program which is scheduled to be chaired by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The country has never tested an ICBM before.
The United States slammed North Korea s latest missile test as a provocation and insisted Sunday it is working closely with China to resolve a crisis that Washington sees as reaching a critical stage.
Instead he reiterated two Chinese proposals that the USA rejected. The administration's immediate emphasis, they said, was to be on increasing pressure on Pyongyang with the help of Beijing.
The officials weren't authorized to speak publicly on the results of the policy review and requested anonymity. Under rainfall, Pence later stood a few meters from the military demarcation line outside Freedom House, gazing at the North Korean soldiers across the border, and then peered at a deforested stretch of North Korea from a lookout post in the hillside.
Even though the missile launch was unsuccessful, the US and South Korea are still on high alerts.
Two North Korean soldiers filmed the scene from their side of the concrete berm that separates the two sides in the truce village of Panmunjom.
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