North Korea just tested a missile and its neighbours tracked a shorter range

North Korea just fired a missile it says can dodge radar.

And here's the problem. The two countries tracking it caught it flying two completely different distances.

Kim Jong Un watched the whole thing himself. It happened at dawn about a day ago, from the Wonsan area on North Korea's east coast.

North Korea's state media, KCNA, says the missile flew about 1,000 kilometres before hitting a target in the East Sea.

South Korea says no it didn't. Its Joint Chiefs of Staff tracked it at just over 700 kilometres. Japan's Defence Ministry clocked it at about 680 kilometres, landing outside Japan's economic waters.

So there's a gap of 300 kilometres or more between what North Korea says and what its neighbours actually saw.

Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un's sister and a senior official in the ruling party, says that gap is the whole point.

She calls it a 'wavelike trajectory mode'. The missile changes height mid-flight, on purpose, to confuse exactly this kind of tracking.

Kim Yo Jong says the enemy failed to track the targets once the missile hit its first skip point, and that there is no way to avoid the attack.

So North Korea isn't calling this a tracking error. It's calling it proof the missile works.

She also says the missile can shift course at low altitude, and carries some kind of artificial intelligence that's supposed to make it harder to shoot down. North Korea hasn't said what that artificial intelligence actually does.

South Korea hasn't confirmed any of it. Reporting from the region notes Seoul routinely accuses North Korea of overstating its weapons. This time South Korea's government has just declined to engage with the claims at all.

And there's a separate argument over what was even fired.

One assessment reported by Army Recognition says the roughly 700-kilometre flight is consistent with North Korea's existing Hwasong-11 tactical missile, just launched at a shorter range. Not a new weapon at all.

But experts cited by Korea Times think this could be the Hwasong-16 Na, a medium-range hypersonic missile, based on the low-altitude manoeuvre North Korea described.