SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Wednesday morning that appeared to reach as far as the Philippines, an apparent success for the country’s young and untested new leader, Kim Jong-un, and a step toward the nation’s goal of mastering the technology needed to build an intercontinental ballistic missile.
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The Sohae rocket launching facility in Cholsan County in North Pyongan Province, North Korea.
KNS/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Kim Jong-un, shown last month, wants to be seen as a leader hailed at home and feared abroad.
South Korean and Japanese officials said the initial indications were that the first and second stages of the Galaxy-3 rocket, called the Unha-3 by the North, fell into the sea along a route the country had previously announced.
But the timing of the launching appeared to take American officials by surprise. Just an hour or two before blastoff from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station in Tongchang-ri on North Korea’s western coast, near China, American officials at a holiday reception at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Washington said they thought the North Koreans had run into technical problems that could take them weeks to resolve.
For President Obama, the launching deepened the complexity of dealing with the new North Korean government, after four years in which promises of engagement, then threats of deeper sanctions, have done nothing to modify the country’s behavior.
In the days before the launching, Mr. Obama’s aides were talking about “Iran-style sanctions” against North Korea if it ignored warnings from the West and from China to forgo it. “We think this time the Chinese are angry enough that they are serious about sending a message,” a senior American official said before the launching. “But they’ve told us that before.”
North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said that the rocket succeeded in the ostensible goal of putting an earth-observation satellite named Kwangmyongsong-3, or Shining Star-3, into orbit.
Kim Min-seok, the spokesman for South Korea’s Defense Ministry, said his government was trying to verify the North Korean claim.
But the rocket appeared to fly along the trajectory North Korea had previously given to international maritime and aviation authorities, crossing over the western sea border between the two Koreas two minutes after blastoff. Six minutes later, it flew over waters west of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, Mr. Kim said, citing data from antimissile ships deployed to track the rocket.
The rocket launching was expected to set off a flurry of diplomacy in the region. In Seoul, President Lee Myung-bak, who is coming to the end of his term in office, convened a National Security Council meeting to discuss its implications, as well as punishment against the North Korean government, which is banned from launching the rocket under United Nations resolutions.
For the young North Korean leader, barely a year in office, the launching was important in three respects. Its apparent success, after a test of the same rocket failed spectacularly seconds after takeoff in April, demonstrated what one American intelligence official called “a more professional operation” to diagnose and solve rocket-design problems similar to those the United States encountered in the 1960s, when its rocket and missile programs were still in their early days. He built credibility with the powerful North Korean military, whose ranks he purged in recent months, replacing some top leaders with his own loyalists.
He also advertised that the country, despite its backwardness and isolation, could master a missile technology that it has previously marketed to Iran, Pakistan and others. Some American officials, who have privately warned of increased missile cooperation between Iran and North Korea over the past year, have argued that the North Korean test would benefit Iran as much as North Korea.
The North has a long way to go before it could threaten neighboring countries, and perhaps one day the West Coast of the United States, with a nuclear-armed missile. It has yet to develop a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop its missile, experts say, and it has not tested a re-entry vehicle that could withstand the heat of the atmosphere. Nor is it clear that the country knows how to aim a missile with much accuracy
North Korea Launches Rocket, Defying Likely Sanctions
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North Korea Launches Rocket, Defying Likely Sanctions
