South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have announced that Seoul held a missile exercise minutes after Pyongyang launched its intercontinental ballistic missile early on Wednesday.
"South Korea's military showed its stern resolve and capability to counter the North's threat by conducting live-fire missile training after the provocation," the county's news agency Yonhap quoted Gen. Jeong Kyeong-doo, JCS chairman, as saying.
The "precision strike" launch, JCS said, came at around 3:23 a.m. local time, about six minutes after the take-off of the North Korean missile.
The video of the exercise, which was posted on Twitter by news aggregator The Intel Crab, shows three consecutive launches surrounded by fumes of smoke. The missiles reportedly hit their targets about 50 meters out at sea.
NEW footage from #SouthKorea shows units conducing a massive simulated military strike in response to #NorthKorea's latest ICBM test. pic.twitter.com/cvsvXmCgTV
— The Intel Crab (@IntelCrab) 29 ноября 2017 г.
The training drill comes as a response to North Korea, which launched "an unidentified ballistic missile into the East Sea from the vicinity of Pyongsong, South Pyongan Province, at around 3:17 a.m.," JCS said.
According to its estimates, the North Korean ICBM, which Pyongyang said was a Hwasong-15, flew some 2,800 miles (4,500 km) into space, making it the highest so far out of its three ICBM tests, and landed nearly 600 miles (965 km) away, also making it the longest test. It came after a 75-day long hiatus since its last launch on September 15.
