“It is a situation we will handle.”

North Korea launched the missile at around 3am local time (6pm GMT), sparking a furious response from Seoul.

Within minutes of North Korea's ICBM launch, South Korea had fired its own missile launch in retaliation.

The North Korean missile was fired eastwards from the hermit state. The missile landed about 210km west of Japan's Kyurokujima island, Tokyo said.

Japanese media reports the missile was in the air for 50 minutes - indicating a very high altitude flight path.

It traveled east for around 620 miles and to an altitude of 2,500 miles before crashing into the Sea of Japan.