SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea may have rushed its rocket launch in an apparently unsuccessful effort to beat South Korea to space, a security analyst said today, while a Seoul official suggested the North had hoped to showcase its technology for export.
While Pyongyang continued to claim it put a satellite into orbit, the rest of the world was analyzing what looked to be largely a failure, although the distance the rocket traveled was twice as far as anything the North previously sent up.
Exclusive footage of Sunday’s launch obtained by APTN in Pyongyang showed the rocket blasting off in a plume of smoke and blazing through the skies over the coastal, northeastern launch pad. Some TV stations in Japan interrupted coverage today to broadcast the footage, the world’s first glimpse of the launch. North Koreans got their first look some 40 minutes later on state TV.
Meanwhile, U.N. Security Council diplomats squabbled over how — or even whether — to punish North Korea for what President Barack Obama and other world leaders called a provocative launch and a violation of sanctions imposed after the North’s underground nuclear test in 2006.
The North claims it is entitled to the peaceful use of space and says it plans to launch more satellites. The U.S., South Korea and Japan say such launches include the same technology used for ballistic missiles, which are banned under the 2006 U.N. sanctions.
South Korea has sent six satellites into orbit from foreign space centers and had planned to carry out is own launch by June aboard a rocket developed jointly with Russia, but has postponed it by a month.
Tim Brown, a senior fellow at the security analyst group Globalsecurity.org, suggested that the North may have tried to put up a satellite first for a propaganda victory.
But Brown said the rocket’s second and third stages, tracked by the U.S. and South Korea as they fell into the Pacific Ocean with the payload still attached, appeared to have failed, the same issue the North had with previous launches that fizzled.
“The second and third stages appear to have had trouble separating,” he said, mirroring comments from other analysts. “It’s much more of a loss than a success.”
Still, the North’s engineers will have learned valuable lessons, Brown said. “In the early stages of the U.S. space program, there were a lot of failures,” he said.
South Korea’s defense minister said the North may have been trying to show off its missile technology for export.
“I think that’s one of the reasons for developing” the rocket, Lee Sang-hee told a parliamentary meeting.
Pyongyang is suspected of sharing missile technology with Iran, and an intelligence expert with a track record of accurate information said a 15-member Iranian delegation went to the launch site last Thursday. He spoke on condition on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Brown noted that the Iranians “look to be a little further ahead.”
“The Iranians were successful last year in putting up a satellite, and the North Koreans weren’t,” he said.
North Korea is believed to have up to eight nuclear warheads but has not demonstrated the ability to miniaturize them enough to fit on a ballistic missile, several analysts have said.
Pyongyang’s repeated claims of a successful satellite launch are likely linked to the opening of North Korea’s parliament on Thursday, when leader Kim Jong Il is expected to make his first major public appearance since last August. U.S. and South Korean officials say he suffered a stroke at the time; North Korea denies he was ever ill.
Today, state-run North Korean television broadcast a one-hour documentary showing Kim on an energetic tour of factories and farms he reportedly undertook in November and December.
It was the first time Pyongyang released video of the 67-year-old Kim taken since mid-August.
The communist country’s main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the launch heralded victory for its plan to become a powerful nation by 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of national founder Kim Il Sung.
“We should rush for the ultimate victory,” the paper quoted supreme leader Kim, son of the North’s founding father, as saying.
At the United Nations, Japanese Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone warned that the Security Council must give a strong response or risk losing its authority.
“The U.N. Security Council should respond properly and teach North Korea a lesson that it has to pay for the act of provocation,” Nakasone told a news conference.
Diplomats privy to continuing talks in New York said China, Russia, Libya and Vietnam have voiced concerns about further alienating and destabilizing North Korea. China, the North’s closest ally, and Russia hold veto power as permanent members and could dilute any response.
“We should avoid making hasty decisions,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said today, according to the Interfax news agency.
And in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu declined to call the liftoff a provocative act and said it wasn’t yet clear whether it was an attempt to place a satellite in orbit or test a long-range missile test.
South Korea said most of the rocket splashed down about 1,900 miles from the launch site.
Still, that is double the distance a North Korean rocket managed in 1998 and far better than a 2006 launch of a missile that fizzled 42 seconds after liftoff.
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