What's behind the sudden increase in missile tests from North Korea?

Millions of residents of northern Japan will have felt a sense of deja vu on Tuesday morning when they were alerted to a North Korean missile flying overhead. Five years earlier, they had twice been shaken from their slumber by Japanese government warnings to seek shelter after missile launches by Pyongyang. North Korea has fired another ballistic missile, South says. As is the case with every other major display of North Korean military might, timing and context are as important as any indication that the regime's weapons are becoming more technologically advanced - and more threatening. The consensus among Pyongyang watchers was that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, would avoid taking any action that could steal the regional limelight from China - the North's main ally and biggest aid donor - as it prepares to hold a rare Communist party congress on 16 October. The war in Ukraine has not only become a distraction for Joe Biden, it has opened the door to closer ties between Pyongyang and Moscow, while recent Chinese military activity in the Taiwan Strait has enabled the North to exploit rising tensions between Washington and Beijing. As the Centre for Strategic and International Studies noted this week, previous sequences of North Korean ballistic missile tests have been followed by a nuclear test. "We are in a cycle of weapons provocations. What's left, essentially, is an intercontinental ballistic missile test and potentially the long-awaited seventh nuclear test."