By Hyonhee Shin

Seoul (Reuters) – North Korea fired a ballistic missile on Thursday, warning of a “harder military response” to US efforts with its allies to increase its security presence in the region, saying Washington was taking a “repentant gamble”.

North Korea has conducted a record number of such tests this year and has recently fired hundreds of artillery shells into the sea, while South Korea and the United States held exercises, some of which included Japan.

The South Korean military said the ballistic missile was launched from the city of Wonsan on North Korea’s east coast at 10:48 a.m. local time and flew 240km at an altitude of 47km.

The latest statement comes less than two hours after North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui criticized a trilateral summit between the United States, South Korea and Japan on Sunday, where leaders criticized Pyongyang’s weapons tests and promised greater security cooperation.

Choe said the three countries’ “war exercises on aggression” failed to control North Korea but presented them with a “more serious, realistic and inevitable threat”.

The US has been saying since May that North Korea was preparing to conduct its first nuclear test since 2017, but it’s unclear when that will happen.

(Reported by Hyonhee Shin; additional reporting by Soo-hyang Choi of Seoul and David Brunnstrom of Washington, DC)