SEOUL – He had also threatened “fire and flames”, like Donald Trump, but on the American island of Guam , in the Pacific, and this time he went there if not surely closer than last time. Kim Jong-un knocks on the gates of Tokyo, flying 2700 kilometers, to a height of 550, a missile that after passing Hokkaido breaks into three parts in the Sea of ​​Japan. “It is a serious and unprecedented threat,” says the government there: it has already happened, actually, in 1998 and then in 2009, even if Pyongyang then masked the trick by dressing it as a test for a satellite. It is however the eighteenth missile launched by Pyongyang in 2017.

But North Korea has since become much, much more dangerous. The Korean services are convinced that it would already be ready to mount an atomic bomb on an intercontinental missile : therefore able to reach the USA. In any case – according to South Korean sources – this ballistic missile would be the first designed to carry a nuclear warhead. It would be the “red line” that South Korean president Moon Jae-in swore that Kim should not pass. And just to stop it yesterday announced that it wants to update the defense capacity, but also of offense, of the country.

He himself, who is the elected president with a promise to dialogue with the North. Just him, who after the triple launch on Saturday had invited not to make hasty conclusions: reasoning once shared by the American friend, with the secretary of state Rex Tillerson to repeat that it takes time, after having even praised, in recent days, the “moderation” of the Young Marshal. Trump had said more: do you see that he has begun to show us respect?

The new provocation turned Japan upside down: it flew over us, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe confirmed, appearing on TV, and the government gave instructions to the people of the north of the country to put themselves, in the case, safe. The alarm went off on TV: “Missile launch, missile launch, take to a safe place”. The Americans have limited themselves to saying, as happens in these cases, that the launch does not constitute any danger for the United States.