North Korea answers US olive branch with missile launch

South Korea detected 10 ballistic missiles hours after Pyongyang dismissed Washington's decision to scale back joint exercises with Seoul

North Korea has fired several short-range ballistic missiles, Seoul's military said on Thursday, hours after US President Donald Trump said he would meet Pyongyang's Kim Jong-un this year.

The latest launches from the nuclear-armed North come as South Korea and the United States hold a shorter edition of their annual Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises, following an order from Trump to scale them back.

Pyongyang has long condemned US-South Korea joint exercises as rehearsals for invasion, often staging missile launches around the drills.

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Trump, seeking to revive the bond he claims to have forged with Kim in his first term, told reporters at the White House on Wednesday he planned to meet the North Korean leader later this year.

The US president also said it was important to "get along" with Kim, adding that Pyongyang now had 57 "very powerful" nuclear weapons. Seoul says there are around 80 to 120.

Hours after Trump's remarks, an official from Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff said that the North fired "around 10 short-range ballistic missiles" from the Pyongyang area.

Japan earlier said a suspected "ballistic missile launched by North Korea a short while ago has already fallen", according to a social media post from the prime minister's office.

Trump's sudden focus on Kim and his scaling back of joint US-South Korean military drills have alarmed Asian allies, while sparking speculation that he was seeking a foreign policy win as the Iran war stalls.

Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, dismissed Trump's overture on Wednesday. She said it was not even worthy of comment.

"The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won't change even though their duration and size were reduced," she said. "If the US calculates that it can propagate its recent measure as the one of so-called good faith, they will not get the desired answer."

She also cited a series of other military drills carried out by the US and South Korea earlier this year and South Korea's push to introduce nuclear-powered submarines.

Kim Yo-jong still refrained from the typical North Korean reaction of fiery rhetoric and said personal relations between her brother and Trump are "still excellent". That signals North Korea would want to wait for Trump to make bigger concessions before returning to talks.

She denied Trump's claim that her brother had responded to his request for a conversation.

When asked by reporters on Wednesday if he would be meeting with Kim Jong-un this year, Trump said that "yeah, I will be". He wouldn't answer a question about whether he was exchanging letters with Kim but said he got along with him.

Additional reporting by Associated Press