North Korea Fires Multiple Missiles in Fourth Launch in a Month

Photo: Yonhap (people in Seoul watching a news report on North Korea's missile launches, 4 November 2026)

North Korea fired several missiles toward the East Sea early on Wednesday, South Korea's military said, its fourth weapons launch in a month and the third ballistic missile launch in a week if the latest test is confirmed as such. The missiles were launched from the Sondok area on North Korea's eastern coast and are believed to have flown less than 300 kilometres.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff said the launch was detected early on Wednesday and that details were being analysed together with the United States. Yonhap reported that the military was leaving open the possibility that different types of missiles were fired at the same time, and that one expert, Shin Jong-woo of the Seoul based Korea Defense and Security Forum, said it appears to be the Hwasong-11 Ra surface to surface tactical ballistic missile.

The pace of testing is the story here. Just days earlier, North Korea fired around a dozen short range ballistic missiles from the Wonsan area, less than a week after the South Korean military proposed military talks with Pyongyang over the inter Korean border. On Tuesday, Pyongyang said it had tested a new cluster warhead for strategic cruise missiles the previous day, claiming it could destroy an area of 5 to 6 hectares with high density power.

The launch also landed in the middle of a sharp public row with Washington. Hours earlier, Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, denied that Pyongyang was behind the theft of more than $6 billion in crypto assets from Binance, the world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange. The FBI had blamed a North Korean hacking group known as TraderTraitor, which was also behind a $1.5 billion hack of the Bybit exchange last year.

Kim Yo Jong dismissed the FBI announcement as a trite provocation and ruled out dialogue with Washington until the United States abandoned what she called its hostile policy. Al Jazeera reported her words: "It is our clear stand that we have no need to sit face to face with such unreliable and hostile persons." She added that the choice for peace includes dialogue, but that dialogue is not surely equated with national interests for North Korea.

That puts a question mark over the diplomacy US President Donald Trump has talked about. Trump said in August that he plans to meet Kim Jong Un later this year, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with the North Korean leader during his first term, and said it was important to get along with Pyongyang, adding that it had 57 very powerful nuclear weapons. Previous talks between Kim and Trump in 2019 ended abruptly over disagreements on the nuclear programme, and in October the United States, South Korea and Japan again called for the complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula.

Analysts say the faster testing this year, which has included a submarine launched ballistic missile, hypersonic missiles, attack drones and cluster bombs designed to be carried by ballistic missiles, is likely a bid to increase North Korea's leverage in any future diplomacy. A short range launch like this one does not threaten the United States mainland, but it keeps pressure on Seoul and Tokyo and reminds Washington that Pyongyang can set the pace of tension whenever it chooses.

The timing, coinciding with the US midterm elections, will not have been lost on anyone in Washington. As Americans voted in an election widely seen as a referendum on Trump, Democrats flipped the US Senate and were projected to win the US House, while Pyongyang was firing missiles on the other side of the world. Missile testing is a familiar theme in this region: Pakistan itself recently tested its first home made Fa'az air to air missile, a reminder that new weapons are being shown off by several states at once.

Sources

Yonhap: N. Korea fires multiple missiles toward East Sea

Al Jazeera: N Korea fires multiple missiles, denies US claims on Binance hack

Reuters: North Korea fires multiple missiles in fourth weapons launch in a month, Seoul says

Watch for Seoul's final analysis of the missile type and range, and for any response from Washington once the midterm results settle.

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