NORTH KOREA test-fired at least five missiles early today, defying warnings from foreign governments and risking international action against the isolated Stalinist state.

At dawn local time, there were contradictory reports of the number and type of the missiles, but there appeared to have been more than three separate launches.

Two of these were medium-range Scud-type missiles, which landed in the sea that divides North Korea from Japan. But at least one may have been a Taepodong-2, a long-range intercontinental missile able to strike Japan, Hawaii and Alaska. “We believe it was the Taepodong-2,” a Pentagon official said.

US officials suggested that that missile had failed 40 seconds after being fired from a site in the northeast of North Korea. None landed close to land or caused any damage.

However, they will cause further concern to foreign governments, especially Japan, South Korea and the United States, already anxious about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.

Stephen Hadley, the US National Security Advisor, described the move as “provocative”, but stressed that it posed no threat to the territory of the US.

In Tokyo, Japan’s most senior Cabinet members gathered in an emergency meeting. “We sternly protest to North Korea,” Shinzo Abe, the chief Cabinet secretary, said. “The launches were done despite advance warning by the relevant countries.” Japan threatened take the matter to the UN Security Council.

The missile tests — timed to coincide with the fireworks of the US Fourth of July celebrations and the launch of the space shuttle Discovery — follow weeks of anxious speculation after satellite photographs revealed a Taepodong missile apparently being prepared on a launch site.

Even China, North Korea’s Cold War ally and the closest thing that the eccentric state has to a friend, warned against the launch.

The most recent high-level warning came last week from President Bush and Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, who was visiting him in Washington. On Monday the state-run Korea Central News Agency gave warning of “relentless annihilating strike and a nuclear war” if an attack was launched against North Korea. In 1998 Japan was alarmed when a long- range North Korean missile was fired into the Pacific after flying over the Japanese mainland.

THE WEAPONRY

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