North Korea fires long-range rocket

JEAN H. LEE

Asso­ci­ated Press

PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea fired a long-range rocket early Fri­day, South Korean and U.S. offi­cials said, defy­ing inter­na­tional warn­ings against mov­ing for­ward with a launch widely seen as a provocation.

Space offi­cials had announced they would launch a satel­lite this week as part of cel­e­bra­tions hon­or­ing North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, and liftoff took place at 7:39 a.m. from the west coast launch pad in the ham­let of Tongchang-ri, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff in Seoul said, cit­ing South Korean and U.S. intelligence.

How­ever, the launch appeared to have failed, with the rocket splin­ter­ing into pieces moments after take­off, South Korea’s Defense Min­istry said in Seoul.

“We sus­pect the North Korean mis­sile has fallen as it divided into pieces min­utes after liftoff,” Defense Min­istry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters.

In Wash­ing­ton, a U.S. offi­cial also said the launch appeared to have failed. The offi­cial offered no fur­ther details and would not dis­cuss the source of the information.

Tokyo, which was pre­pared to shoot down any rocket fly­ing over its ter­ri­tory, also con­firmed a launch from North Korea.

“We have con­firmed that a cer­tain fly­ing object has been launched and fell after fly­ing for just over a minute,” Japan’s Defense Min­is­ter Naoki Tanaka said. He said there was no impact on Japan­ese territory.

“For all their advanced tech­nol­ogy, these rock­ets are fairly frag­ile things,” said Brian Wee­den, a tech­ni­cal adviser at Secure World Foun­da­tion who is a for­mer Air Force offi­cer at the U.S. Space Com­mand. “You’re look­ing at a metal cylin­der that has fairly thin walls that con­tains a lot of high pres­sure liquid.”

In Pyongyang, there was no word about a launch, and at the time, state tele­vi­sion was broad­cast­ing video of pop­u­lar folk tunes. North Korean offi­cials said they would make an announce­ment about the launch “soon.”

North Korea had ear­lier announced it would send a three-stage rocket mounted with a satel­lite as part of cel­e­bra­tions hon­or­ing late Pres­i­dent Kim Il Sung, whose 100th birth­day is being cel­e­brated Sunday.

A fail­ure would be a huge blow to a nation that has staked its pride on a satel­lite launch seen as a show of strength amid per­sis­tent eco­nomic hard­ship as North Korea’s young new leader, Kim Jong Un, solid­i­fies power fol­low­ing the death of his father, long­time leader Kim Jong Il, four months ago.

North Korean space offi­cials said the Unha-3 rocket is meant to send a satel­lite into orbit to study crops and weather pat­terns — its third bid to launch a satel­lite since 1998. Offi­cials took for­eign jour­nal­ists to the west coast site to see the rocket and the Kwangmyongsong-3 satel­lite Sun­day in a bid to show its trans­parency amid accu­sa­tions of defiance.

The United States, Britain, Japan and oth­ers have called such a launch a vio­la­tion of U.N. res­o­lu­tions pro­hibit­ing North Korea from nuclear and bal­lis­tic mis­sile activity.

Experts say the Unha-3 car­rier is the same type of rocket that would be used to launch a long-range mis­sile aimed at the U.S. and other tar­gets. North Korea has tested two atomic devices but is not believed to have mas­tered the tech­nol­ogy needed to mount a nuclear war­head on a long-range missile.

U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Rod­ham Clin­ton, speak­ing for the Group of Eight nations after their for­eign min­is­ters met in Wash­ing­ton, said Thurs­day that all the mem­bers of the bloc agreed to be pre­pared to take fur­ther action against North Korea in the Secu­rity Coun­cil if the launch went ahead.

“Pyongyang has a clear choice: It can pur­sue peace and reap the ben­e­fits of closer ties with the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity, includ­ing the United States; or it can con­tinue to face pres­sure and iso­la­tion,” Clin­ton said.

South Korean Pres­i­dent Lee Myung-bak was con­ven­ing an emer­gency secu­rity meet­ing, offi­cials said.

Accord­ing to pro­jec­tions, the first stage of the rocket was to fall into the ocean off the west­ern coast of South Korea, while a sec­ond stage would fall into waters off the east­ern coast of the Philip­pine island of Luzon.

Wee­den said the launch appeared to be a fail­ure of both space and mis­sile objectives.

“The ear­lier it breaks up, the less data you’ve col­lected, so the less use­ful that test is likely to be,” he said. “It’s very likely that the U.S. and its allies prob­a­bly gath­ered more info about this test than the North Kore­ans have.”

He said U.S. and other nations had been poised to keep close watch on the launch to gather intel­li­gence about the state of North Korea’s rocket program.

Posted by AP News on Apr 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.