A senior White House official said Sunday that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) had apparently test-fired a short-range missile.

"It appears that there was a test of a short-range missile by the North Koreans and it landed in the Sea of Japan. We're not surprised by this. The North Koreans have tested their missiles before. They've had some failures," White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said in an interview with CNN's "Late Edition".

"We have to work together with our allies around the world ...to demonstrate that North Korea's actions are inappropriate," he said.

"We don't want them to have any nuclear weapons, we don't want the Korean peninsula to have any nuclear weapons on it," he added.

Reports of the missile test came days after the director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the DPRK was believed to have the capability to arm a missile with a nuclear device, and one day before representatives of 189 nations meet at the United Nations to review the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Jacoby told lawmakers in his testimony last Thursday that the range of the DPRK's weapons could reach Alaska and Hawaii and a portion of northwest United States.

Jacoby's remarks were played down later by defense officials, saying that US intelligence officials believed the DPRK was several years away from being able to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile that could reach the United States.