SEOUL — North Korea launched two short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026, South Korea’s military said, in launches about three hours apart, according to the Associated Press.

The firings came days after the North threatened to bolster its nuclear deterrent and respond to what it called U.S. hostilities. They were the latest in a series of weapons demonstrations even after President Donald Trump scaled back a joint U.S.–South Korea military exercise last month in an apparent effort to revive diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, AP reported.

CBS News framed the launches as North Korea dialing up pressure on the United States; that pressure framing is CBS’s, not an independent assessment invented here. The Washington Examiner carried the same AP Seoul dispatch.

South Korea’s military said the two launches were conducted from North Korea’s eastern coastal Wonsan area. The first missile flew about 450 kilometers (280 miles) and the second more than 600 kilometers (370 miles), both toward the North’s eastern waters, the military said via AP and CBS. The missiles ended up in the sea. Japan’s Defense Ministry said it detected a suspected North Korean missile earlier Sunday that did not land in Japanese territorial waters, AP reported.

South Korea’s presidential office urged an immediate halt to ballistic missile launches banned under U.N. Security Council resolutions. The South’s military said it maintains readiness to repel provocations under its alliance with the United States, AP said.

AP noted that Kim’s sister and senior official, Kim Yo Jong, had earlier shrugged off Trump’s drill reduction, saying shortening the exercise would not change its “provocative, aggressive nature,” and that North Korea later fired about 10 short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea after that U.S.–South Korean drill. On Friday, she slammed another U.S.-led multilateral maritime exercise in the region as a “frantic military move,” AP reported.

Great-power escalation theater on the peninsula rewards skepticism: Pyongyang’s nuclear-deterrent rhetoric, Washington’s on-again diplomacy with Kim, and Seoul’s alliance signaling each serve domestic and alliance audiences. What is on the open record Sunday is two SRBMs toward the sea, about three hours apart, attributed to South Korea’s military via AP — not a mash-up with unrelated Middle East or European packages.

Sources