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North Korea Launches Rocket Seen as Cover for a Missile Test
North Korea Launches Rocket Seen as Cover for a Missile Test
By CHOE SANG-HUNFEB. 6, 2016
SEOUL, South Korea — Defying warnings of tougher sanctions from Washington, North Korea launched a rocket on Sunday that Western experts believe is part of a program to develop intercontinental ballistic missile technologies.
The rocket blasted off from Tongchang-ri, the North’s main satellite launch site near its northwestern border with China, a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry said.
President Park Geun-hye of South Korea called an emergency meeting of top national security advisers on Sunday to address the launch, her office said. South Korea, the United States and Japan also requested an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry called the launch a “major provocation, threatening not only the security of the Korean Peninsula, but that of the region and the United States as well.” Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, said it was “a flagrant violation of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions.”
North Korea earlier notified the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency overseeing navigation safety, that it planned to launch a rocket between Sunday and Feb. 14 to put a satellite into orbit. After the launch on Sunday, North Korea said that it had succeeded in doing so, and South Korea acknowledged that it appeared to be the case.
The United States and allied nations had condemned North Korea’s plan because they consider its satellite program to be a sort of cover for developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering a nuclear bomb. Under a series of Security Council resolutions, North Korea is prohibited from developing nuclear weapons or ballistic-missile technologies.
Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whose family has ruled the country for seven decades, wanted to show off advances in his missile and nuclear programs just before the Feb. 16 birthday of his father, Kim Jong-il, who died in 2011. Pyongyang has timed some of its earlier nuclear and rocket tests to major national anniversaries.
North Korea insists its space program is peaceful, intended to put scientific satellites into orbit. It has attempted several launches since 1998, finally succeeding in putting a small satellite into space in 2012.
But the United States and its allies consider the program a pretext for developing technologies that can also be used to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. The North’s launch of a three-stage rocket on Sunday, after a similar test in 2012, showed that the country was determined to acquire them despite sanctions imposed by the Security Council.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.