South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said it detected a ballistic missile launched early Saturday from the Wonsan area towards the East Sea. Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, later announced that it had been an intermediate-range strategic missile test supervised by her brother.
Kim said the weapon had artificial intelligence and could change its flight orbit at low altitude. She claimed those features made it impossible to evade, declaring: “There is no way to avoid this attack.”
The South Korean military said the missile flew more than 700 kilometres (435 miles). Japan’s Defense Ministry put the flight at about 680 kilometers (422 miles), and Japan’s military said it landed in waters outside its exclusive economic zone.
Kim said North Korea’s use of a “wavelike trajectory mode” had frustrated tracking in past tests. “Whenever we applied the wavelike trajectory mode to missiles, the enemy failed to track the targets from their first skip points,” she said. She also claimed Kim Jong Un believed no country could acquire such technology for at least several years.
The claims have not been independently assessed in the information released with the announcement. The precise technical specifications of the missile, the operation of its trajectory mode and whether its artificial-intelligence features work as described remain unknown.
The launch was reported on 3 October 2026. It took place hours after Seoul said Pyongyang had launched a ballistic missile. The US Pacific Command said the launch “does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies”.
The test came amid a sharper dispute on the Korean border. Seoul’s military had demanded an apology from Pyongyang days earlier after a blast in the Demilitarized Zone wounded three South Korean soldiers. Pyongyang denied responsibility for the explosion.
On 30 September, Kim Yo Jong also denied North Korean responsibility for border land mine blasts and threatened retaliation if South Korea fired on North Korean troops. North Korea had tested what its state media described as a hypersonic missile system at Wonsan on 20 September.
Kim Jong Un had stressed last month that the country needed to raise the level of artificial intelligence in its weapons systems. If the missile performs as Kim Yo Jong claims, South Korea and Japan face a more demanding task in detecting, tracking and defending against it.
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