North Korea launched three medium-range ballistic missiles eastward from a coastal site early Thursday, sending them into international waters off the country’s eastern coast and prompting protests from Tokyo, Seoul and Washington in a rare daylight test that allied officials described as an unmistakable attempt to capitalize on the Trump administration’s preoccupation with the Iran war. The launches, carried out within a 22-minute window beginning at 7:14 a.m. local time, were the first North Korean tests of any kind since February and the first conducted during daylight hours in nearly two years.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the three projectiles flew between 740 and 810 kilometers on lofted trajectories before splashing down inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, though outside its territorial waters. Japan’s defense ministry confirmed the trajectories and said there were no reports of damage to commercial shipping or aircraft. The Japanese coast guard had issued no advance warning, consistent with Pyongyang’s longstanding refusal to notify maritime authorities of test launches.

President Donald Trump, briefed aboard Air Force One during a return flight from a midwestern campaign event, called the launches “provocative and unwise” in a brief statement issued by the White House, and said the United States would consult with Japanese and South Korean counterparts on a coordinated response. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered an unscheduled passage of the Carl Vinson strike group through waters west of the Korean Peninsula and authorized additional B-1B sorties from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam, two U.S. defense officials said.

The launches came at a politically delicate moment. With three carrier strike groups committed to operations in or near the Gulf and Red Sea and with senior officials consumed by the Islamabad ceasefire track, allied capitals have warned in recent weeks that Pyongyang and other adversaries might calculate that Washington’s bandwidth for additional crises was constrained. “This is a test of attention as much as a test of hardware,” said Dr. Hyun-jin Park, a senior research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “Pyongyang is asking whether anyone in Washington is still watching this peninsula. The answer needs to be unambiguous.”

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung convened an emergency session of the National Security Council at the presidential office in Yongsan, and afterward issued a statement condemning the launches as “a grave violation of multiple Security Council resolutions and an act of intimidation against the people of the Republic of Korea.” Lee, a progressive whose engagement-oriented approach to North Korea has drawn criticism from conservative opposition lawmakers, said Seoul would continue to pursue dialogue but would not relax sanctions enforcement or scale back joint exercises with U.S. and Japanese forces.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba spoke separately with Lee and with Trump within hours of the launches, according to readouts from his office. Ishiba told reporters at a brief stand-up outside the prime minister’s residence that the tests “cannot be tolerated” and that Tokyo would seek an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council. Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said the government had activated J-Alert civil defense notifications in Hokkaido and northern Honshu as a precaution, though no projectiles overflew Japanese territory.

Analysts examining released telemetry said the missiles appeared to be Hwasong-11 variants — a solid-fuel, road-mobile system that South Korean officials assess as North Korea’s most reliably operational medium-range platform. A solid-fuel system can be launched with little visible preparation, making detection by satellites more difficult. The lofted trajectory, in which a missile is fired steeply rather than along its operational arc, is a familiar Pyongyang practice for keeping tests within regional waters while demonstrating range that would, on a normal trajectory, reach much further.

“The hardware itself is not new, but the choice of three near-simultaneous launches from a single site is meaningful,” said Cmdr. James Whitfield, a retired U.S. Navy officer who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School. “It signals that they have moved past one-off demonstrations toward salvo operations, which is a different and more difficult challenge for missile defense planners.”

Chinese reaction was, as is customary, more cautious than the response in allied capitals. A foreign ministry spokesperson in Beijing called for “restraint by all parties” and urged a return to dialogue, language Beijing has used repeatedly since 2017 and which Washington and Seoul have come to read as a sign of Beijing’s limited willingness to pressure Pyongyang publicly. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, traveling in Asia this week, did not address the launches directly but said in a Vladivostok press appearance that “external pressure” was an unproductive approach to peninsular questions.

The launches arrive against the backdrop of accelerating North Korean weapons development that allied intelligence services have tracked over the past 18 months, including resumed activity at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site and increased production of fissile material at Yongbyon. Pyongyang has not conducted a nuclear test since 2017, but a U.S. intelligence assessment circulated in March, portions of which have been described to reporters, judged that the regime could resume nuclear testing on short notice if it chose to do so.

In Seoul, opposition leader Han Dong-hoon called on the Lee government to request additional U.S. strategic asset deployments and to reconsider its suspension of certain leaflet-balloon counter-propaganda operations along the demilitarized zone. Han said in a televised statement that the launches demonstrated that “the gestures of moderation by this administration have produced nothing but contempt.” Lee’s office did not respond directly to the criticism, citing the ongoing security council session.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement that the launches did not pose a direct threat to U.S. personnel or territory but reinforced “the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s unlawful weapons programs.” Adm. Stephen Koehler, the command’s commander, said in the statement that the United States’ commitment to the defense of Japan and the Republic of Korea remained “ironclad.”

Officials in Seoul and Tokyo said additional coordination measures, including possible expanded trilateral exercises and an accelerated schedule for the deployment of a second THAAD battery currently in negotiation, would be discussed at a previously scheduled defense ministerial meeting in Honolulu later this month.