SEOUL: North Korea fired three short-range ballistic missiles on Saturday, the US military said, reviving tensions with Was­hington after President Donald Trump had said Pyongyang was starting to show some “respect”.

The launches come as tens of thousands of South Korean and US troops take part in joint military drills in the south of the peninsula, which the North views as highly provocative.

Following an initial US assessment saying that two of the missiles had “failed in flight”, a spokesman for the US Pacific Command later said the two weapons had not failed but “flew approximately 250 kilometres in a northeastern direction”.

One of the three missiles blew up “almost immediately”, with none of the weapons posing a threat to either North America or the US territory of Guam, the spokesman said.

Lee Il-Woo, an analyst at Korea Defence Network, said the launches represented a “low-level provocative act” carried out in response to the US-South Korea exercises, which are seen by Pyongyang as a rehearsal for an invasion of its own territory.

Published in Dawn, August 27th, 2017