North Korea Tests New Missile, Kim Vows 'Incurable Headache' for Enemy

North Korea said it carried out a successful test of a new weapon on Sunday, with leader Kim Jong Un overseeing the launch and praising advances in the country's war readiness, state media reported on Tuesday.

Kim said the test, conducted by the Missile Administration, marked a significant step in the armed forces' fighting capability. "The enemy will know better what such progress means without any explanation," he was quoted as saying, adding that the reality would give the enemy "an incurable headache and a very cruel and unavoidable blow."

The state report did not identify the type of weapon tested. Photographs showed Kim, accompanied by his teenage daughter, examining a screen that displayed a map of the country's east coast and the flight path of the Hwasongpho-11-ma-1, which is believed to belong to a series of short-range ballistic missiles Pyongyang is upgrading.

A Seoul-based website specialising in North Korea said the projectile appeared to be an upgraded variant of a missile fitted with a hypersonic glide vehicle. Mounting such a vehicle allows a warhead to manoeuvre and evade anti-missile defences, and potentially to be launched partially into orbit. Hypersonic missiles are among the weapons Kim has called for developing to upgrade the country's nuclear capabilities.

South Korea's military said on Sunday that the North had fired two short-range ballistic missiles off its east coast.

The launch came days after Pyongyang accused the United States of raising tensions on the Korean Peninsula through a series of military drills. On Monday, the foreign ministers of South Korea, Japan and the United States met on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York and agreed to coordinate closely for peace, stability and denuclearisation on the Korean Peninsula, according to Seoul's foreign ministry.