North Korea Sets Window in April for Rocket Launch

MARCH 13, 2009

SEOUL -- North Korea announced Thursday that next month it will launch its newest rocket -- which many outside the country suspect is a long-range missile -- giving other countries three weeks to decide whether to shoot it down or deal with the matter in another way.

The launch, slated for some time between April 4 and 8, would violate two United Nations resolutions passed in 2006 to penalize North Korea after it last test-fired a long-range missile. Pyongyang says its new rocket will carry an experimental communications satellite to space and that it has a right to engage in such research.

Many analysts outside North Korea say the new long-range missile could reach the continental U.S.

Military and intelligence analysts in South Korea, Japan and the U.S., through satellite monitoring, spotted preparations for the launch at North Korea's main missile test site in a remote mountainous part of the country's northeast region in late January.

Since then, leaders of the countries that have bargained with North Korea since 2003 to give up nuclear-weapons research efforts -- China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the U.S. -- have warned it not to launch another rocket. Military officials in Japan and the U.S. said they are ready to shoot the rocket down if ordered.

North Korea's authoritarian government since the early 1990s has used provocative acts in weapons development -- such as missile launches and the firing up of nuclear reactors -- to seek monetary payments, food assistance and security guarantees from other countries.

Following the North's statement on Thursday, Japan said it "would not tolerate" any action by Pyongyang that raises tension in northeast Asia.

"Even if it is a satellite launch, there is an international understanding that it would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions," said Yasuhisa Kawamura, a spokesman in Japan's Foreign Ministry.

Before the North's statement, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, describing her meeting with Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi in Washington on Wednesday, said the two countries "will discuss a response if we are not successful in convincing them not to go forward with what is a very provocative act."

A statement earlier this week by another senior Obama administration official signaled the U.S. is unlikely to try to shoot down North Korea's rocket. Dennis Blair, the national intelligence director, told a Senate panel on Tuesday: "I tend to believe that the North Koreans announced that they would do a space launch and that's what they intend."

He added the technology to launch a rocket is indistinguishable from that of a long-range missile.

In 1998, when North Korea launched a long-range missile that landed in the Pacific Ocean, Pyongyang declared it had sent a satellite into space. Analysts never found such a satellite. North Korea didn't try to disguise its 2006 missile launch in that manner.

Its insistence that this new rocket is designed for space travel is widely seen as an effort to blunt any attempt by the U.S. or Japan to shoot it down -- a capability the countries didn't have until recently. Earlier this week, North Korea's military issued a statement that said, "Shooting our satellite for peaceful purposes will precisely mean a war."

Also in the past week, North Korea applied to join two space-related treaties under U.N. auspices, a spokesman for South Korea's foreign ministry said Thursday. Seoul views those moves as more effort by Pyongyang to gain cover for the missile launch, the spokesman said.


The Wall Street Journal.