Early Tuesday morning, North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Japan. Warnings were sent starting at 6:02 a.m., originating at Sapporo then resounding in Tokyo and other parts of the island country. As this was the first time North Korea has fired a missile over Japan and not into the water between the two countries, the action was seen as provocative. A South Korean military official told NBC News that the missile was fired around 5:57 a.m. on Tuesday. The official said that the missile flew for about 1,678 miles, reaching a maximum altitude of 342 miles. U.S. Pacific Command estimated that the missile landed in the ocean at 6:29 a.m. Later, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe said the missile was an unprecedented, serious and a grave threat to Japan. He said he would ask the United Nations to increase the pressure on Pyongyang. Japan is on high alert after the missile flew over the island of Hokkaido, prompting an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council. It has been confirmed that the missile fired over Japan is the same kind as the missile North Korea threatened Guam with.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has referred to the country’s latest missile test over Japan as “a meaningful prelude to containing Guam” and said his country should conduct more missile tests into the Pacific Ocean, maintaining his country’s defiant posture even as the United Nations convened an emergency meeting on containing the threat. The statement again makes the small Pacific island an outsize player in a global struggle over North Korea’s military ambitions. It was frequently mentioned as the United States and North Korea traded belligerent rhetoric earlier this month, with President Trump’s threat of punishing North Korea with “fear and fire” prompting North Korea’s military to announce it was making plans to strike Guam.

As a result, Trump said North Korea had displayed “contempt for its neighbors” and that “all options are on the table” for a response. Trump previously warned Pyongyang that threats against the U.S. would be met with “fire and fury.” North Korean state media subsequently responded by saying that it was considering striking the U.S. territory of Guam. Naturally, the statement increased tensions.

Danny Nguyen, a student at ERHS, feels that “the situation going on in southeast Asia is escalating very severely.” He also hopes that “there is a solution to this.”

Tensions surrounding North Korea’s missile tests have shot up throughout the summer as Kim Jong-un and Trump engaged in a war of words. No one in their right mind would want a war, as United States Secretary of Defense James Mattis pointed out the effect would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale.” However, there is still a risk that the exchanged rhetoric between Trump and Kim Jong-un may lead to fighting that will go too far and could cause unintended consequences.