Missiles in to the waters off its coast as fears over its nuclear capabilities increase. paula hancocks is in seoul for us. what do we know about the missiles and about the timing of the launch? reporter: well, it has been a relatively quiet summer from north korea, about two months since we saw the last missile launch. what we saw this morning was two cruise missiles fired in to the waters of the west coast. the missiles themselves are not of great concern to washington or seoul, they don t technically break any rules. but it does potentially signal that north korea is back to testing once again. the 18th missile test so far this year and it is just ahead of the joint u.s./south korea military drills that will be starting next week. these are live field training drills that we haven t really seen much of over recent years.
And so this kind of show of force is really just to show pyongyang that they are able to strike back if they wanted to. now, of course, whether this makes any difference to kim jong-un it s probably unlikely. he is very much it austin powers in a testing mode at this point with no interest it appears to have any kind of negotiation or engagement with either washington or seoul. we ve heard just last year, january of last year, kim jong-un gave his wish list of his weapons capability. he gave a very open wish list of exactly what he wanted to perfect when it came to his missile campaign and it came to his weapons capabilities, and experts say he s effectively working through it going down the list and making sure that that he can secure these weapons capabilities. some of the recent launches from north korea have been perceived to be failures, but even those are learned from. i don t think yang will understand more about the technology from those failures as well, so even though they
From responding to North Korea to long-term approaches toward China, the U.S., and Japan, South Korea’s next president will have a full agenda from day one.