Seoul: North Korea attempted to launch a missile on Sunday near Sinpo, on its east coast, but the weapon blew up almost immediately after take-off, the US Pacific Command has reported.
South Korea said the missile launch threatened the entire world and warned of punitive action if it led to further provocation such as a nuclear test or a long-range missile launch.
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North Korea parades its military might
Kim Jong-un shows off North Korea's submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) for the first time as the reclusive state marked the 105th birth anniversary of its founding father.
The attempted missile launch comes a day after the North held a military parade in its capital marking the birth anniversary of the state founder where what appeared to be new ballistic missiles were displayed.
The launch was also detected by neighbouring South Korea.
"The North attempted to launch an unidentified missile from near the Sinpo region this morning but it is suspected to have failed," the South's Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. There were no further details, and the office said it was analysing the launch.
In a statement on Sunday, South Korea's Foreign Ministry said: "North Korea showing a variety of offensive missiles at yesterday's military parade and daring to fire a ballistic missile today is a show of force that threatens the whole world."
South Korean National Security Office chief Kim Kwan-jin called a meeting of the National Security Council, the Yonhap news agency reported.
The US Pacific Command confirmed the military detected the North Korea missile launch at 11.21am Hawaii time on April 15 (7.21am AEST April 16) near Sinpo.
The type of missile was still being assessed.
A US Pacific Command spokesman said the US military was "fully committed to working closely with our allies in the Republic of Korea and in Japan to maintain security".
US Vice-President Mike Pence was briefed on the situation while travelling to Seoul on Air Force 2, and has been in contact with US President Donald Trump, CNN reported.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said in a statement: "The President and his military team are aware of North Korea's most recent unsuccessful missile launch."
Mr Trump was not making any further comment, the statement said.
Mr Pence arrives in South Korea at 3.30pm local time and will talk with the acting South Korean President Hwang Kyo-ahn about the situation. His visit is part of a 10-day trip to Asia, in what his aides said was a sign of the US commitment to its ally in the face of rising tensions over the North's weapons programs.
Show of force
On Saturday, what analysts say were three types of intercontinental ballistic missiles rolled through Pyongyang, the North's capital, as the country tried to demonstrate that its military reach is expanding at a time of heightened tensions with the US.
During the parade, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un watched from a platform surrounded by elderly military officers as long columns of goose-stepping soldiers marched through a large plaza, accompanied by a fleet of tanks, missiles and rocket tubes.
Saturday was the 105th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the country's founder, Kim Jong-un's grandfather and the man the younger Kim tries to emulate, in looks and action. Kim Il-sung's birthday, called the Day of the Sun, is the North's most important holiday and a key moment for scoring propaganda points.
The US, China and other regional powers had feared that North Korea might mark the occasion by conducting its sixth nuclear test or by launching an intercontinental ballistic missile. The US sent a naval strike group to the coast of the Korean Peninsula in a show of force that has become a first, wary showdown between Pyongyang and Washington.
But no seismic tremor emanated on Saturday morning from the North's nuclear test site, where recent satellite photographs have shown what appeared to be preparations for an underground detonation.
Instead, Mr Kim seemed to have decided to celebrate his grandfather's birthday not with a nuclear test or a missile launching, but with a military parade meant to demonstrate his missile capabilities.
He is acutely aware that the threat that he could soon possess - a missile that could strike the continental US - is Washington's biggest concern, and both the number and the variety of missiles he showed on Saturday seemed to be sending the message that a pre-emptive strike against his facilities would be fruitless.
New missile debuts in parade
To military analysts scrutinising North Korea's broadcast of Saturday's parade, the most noteworthy element seemed to be three types of long-range ballistic missiles, one of them apparently new.
While the North has repeatedly claimed that it can strike the US with a nuclear warhead, it has never flight-tested an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of crossing the Pacific.
In addition, some analysts doubt that the country has mastered the skills to build a warhead that can survive re-entry from space or one small enough to mount on a long-range missile. They said the intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, that had been displayed in recent North Korean military parades might have been mock-ups of systems still under development.
In a New Year's Day speech, however, Mr Kim claimed that his country was in the "final stage" of preparations for its first ICBM test.
Mr Trump responded with a Twitter message saying that the launching would never be permitted to happen.
One missile shown off was the KN-08, which the North first displayed in a 2012 parade and is widely believed to have been its first attempt at an intercontinental ballistic missile.
Making their parade debut on launcher trucks with huge wheels were very large missiles encased in tubes or canisters. Analysts said the tubes appeared to have been designed for two other kinds of long-range ballistic missiles. There were multiple examples of each tube; it was impossible to see what was in them, but analysts said it was likely that they contained missiles that were either completed or under development.
Militaries use such canisters to "cold launch" missiles, ejecting them high into the air before their fuel ignites. If North Korea perfected that technology, it would help the nation better protect its mobile missiles from environmental damage while being driven around, and from fiery exhaust during launch. The method can also make missiles harder to detect once fired.
"They're not just showing off missiles that are hard to build," said Jeffrey Lewis, a North Korea specialist at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, in California. "They're showing off all the associated technologies you need for credible deployments."
Kim Dong-yub, a missile expert at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, said one kind of tube appeared to be for the KN-14, a modified version of the KN-08 that was first displayed in a parade in 2015, during which the North claimed that its missiles were tipped with nuclear warheads.
The other tube design was new to the analysts. "Given the size, it looks like it contains a new ballistic missile with a range of at least 6000 kilometres," making it potentially an intercontinental threat, said Shin In-kyun, a military expert who runs the Korea Defence Network, a civic group specialising in military affairs.
"Officials in the region will scramble to figure out whether this is a new solid-fuel, long-range ballistic missile the North was believed to be developing."
Almost all of the North's other ballistic missiles use liquid fuel, which can take hours to load from tanker trucks. Like bottle rockets or Roman candles, solid-fuel missiles carry their own combustible supplies, making them easier to transport and fire. North Korean missiles using the method could be kept on submarines or mobile launching pads, hidden in the country's elaborate tunnel system and launched on short notice.
The Pukguksong-2, an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the North tested in February, uses solid-fuel technology. That missile was displayed in a parade for the first time on Saturday. So were the Pukguksong-1 - the North's first submarine-launched ballistic missile, which was successfully tested in August - and the Scud-ER, a Scud with an extended range, designed to reach US military bases in South Korea and Japan.
The New York Times, Reuters, with Kirsty Needham