South Korea Mulls Ballistic Missile Test

China said Monday that the root cause of North Korean missile launches is friction with the United States and South Korea.

“China opposes North Korea’s launch of ballistic missiles in violation of UN Security Council resolutions”, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Thursday pledged that Washington would use the full range of its arsenal, including nuclear weapons, to defend allies Japan and South Korea against North Korea if needed. He said the missile appeared to be a land variant of a submarine-launched ballistic missile known outside of Korea as the KN-11.

The Chinese government is already embroiled in a bitter diplomatic dispute with South Korea over President Park Geun-hye’s decision to deploy a U.S. missile defence system, which Beijing says will disturb the region’s delicate balance of power.

The council met behind closed doors at the request of the United States, Japan and South Korea after Pyongyang announced it had successfully tested a new missile on Sunday, the first launch since Trump took office.

Older North Korean missiles have used liquid fuel, which requires them to travel with huge convoys and to gas up prior to a launch, which gives observers time to prepare and respond.

“North Korea has a wonderful habit of greeting USA presidents with a bit of fireworks”, says Andrei Lankov, a history professor at Kookmin University in Seoul who grew up in the former Soviet Union and studied at a North Korean university.

Protests: Thousands of protesters in more than a dozen Mexican cities take to the streets to express their fierce opposition to Trump, portraying him as a menace to both the U.S. and Mexico. It was appropriate that the two leaders send a unified message on the matter to North Korea as well as the worldwide community. It employs a solid-fuel system that is quicker for launching than the liquid-fuel system employed in the Musudan.

South Korean officials argue that the Pyongyang missile test was conducted in a manner that demonstrated the pressing need for Thaad. “But today’s North Korea is more unsafe. and it is now enduring the harshest sanctions since the end of the Cold War”.

According to the South Korean military and the U.S. Strategic Command, the missile was an intermediate-range Musudan missile.

Trump assured Japan that the US stands behind the country completely.

Abe, who has been criticized by opposition lawmakers at home for not speaking out against some of Trump’s more divisive policies, especially his refugee and immigration measures, said he didn’t discuss them because they were internal US policies.

The sides pledged to collaborate to ensure that all countries fully carry out U.N. Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang and that violations of Security Council resolutions will be met with an “even stronger global response”, according to the statement.

“The United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent”, Trump said at a joint press conference with Abe in Florida.

“The world will be in confusion and uncertainty will grow further unless the USA president fulfills a role as a leader of the free world”, Abe told a House of Representatives Budget Committee meeting, discussing what they spoke about during the first bilateral summit talks since Trump took office on January 20.

The recent launch came after Kim said in his New Year’s speech that his country had entered the final stage of preparations to test-launch an ICBM.

It has said it is on the verge of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile, which could eventually threaten the continental U.S., about 9,000km away.