After rocket fiasco, N. Korea may test bomb:
analysts
HONG KONG: The humiliating failure of North Korea's
much-publicised rocket launch may push the hermit state into
testing a nuclear bomb in an attempt to save face, analysts said
Friday.
Touted as a glorious demonstration of North Korean
technology to mark the centenary of the birth of founding leader
Kim Il-Sung, the rocket instead turned into a damp squib when it
crashed into the sea.
The 30-metre (100-foot) Unha-3 (Galaxy-3) rocket
blasted off early Friday morning from a newly built space centre on
the country's northwestern coast.
But shortly after launch it broke apart and the debris fell into
the Yellow Sea off South Korea, the South's Yonhap news agency
quoted a high-ranking military source as saying.
"North Korea executed its highly anticipated missile launch and
with its failure managed to achieve the second-worst outcome
imaginable. The worst would have been hitting China," Marcus Noland
of the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International
Economics wrote in a blog post.
"The North Koreans have managed in a single stroke to not only defy
the UN Security Council, the United States, and even their patron
China, but also demonstrate ineptitude."
North Korea invited up to 200 foreign journalists to Pyongyang for
the launch and the centenary commemorations on the weekend, the
largest number of overseas media ever welcomed in to the reclusive
state.
The "humiliation" of the rocket failure, Noland said, might force
new leader Kim Jong-Un -- who took over after his father, Kim
Jong-Il, died in December -- to conduct a nuclear weapon test to
restore the country's honour.
"It would be easy to gloat, but paradoxically, the missile failure
may have actually increased the danger the world faces," he
wrote.
"Before the launch, it was probable that North Korea would conduct
a third nuclear test; now it is a virtual certainty."
Analysts say satellite imagery showing what looks like
preparations, and the communist regime's previous patterns of
behaviour -- with missile tests followed by bomb tests -- suggest a
third nuclear test could be imminent.
"Now, after this fiasco, it seems likely that such a test will move
forward at the earliest moment," Noland wrote.
Rory Medcalf, international security programme director at the Lowy
Institute think-tank in Australia, said the regime's plans to test
a uranium-fuelled nuclear device could be pushed forward.
"I will not say definitively that we are going to see a nuclear
test or some other provocation but I think the chances are higher
today than they were yesterday," he told AFP.
North Korea has said the rocket launch was a peaceful attempt to
put a satellite into orbit but the United States, South Korea and
Japan have condemned it as a poorly disguised ballistic missile
test.
UN resolutions ban the North from testing long-range missiles that
could be used to launch a satellite or a nuclear warhead.
The North is believed to have six to eight plutonium-fuelled atom
bombs, and analysts say it is working on a uranium-based device. It
last conducted a nuclear test in 2009.
Jingdong Yuan, acting director at the Centre for International
Security Studies at the University of Sydney, said that if the
country's military leaders wanted to push on with a nuclear test
"they will have their way".
But the temptation will be weighed against the risk that another
embarrassing failure will ruin the centennial celebrations, he
said.
IHS Jane's managing director Tate Nurkin said the "biggest concern
about North Korea is their weakness not their strength".
"We don't think that North Korea is seeking conflict. They are
seeking attention and the concessions that come with that attention
that can help prop up the regime," he said in a statement.
North Korea has been developing missiles for decades both for what
it terms self-defence and as a lucrative export commodity.
Previous tests have had mixed results, and the last long-range
launch in 2009, which came shortly before the nuclear test, is also
believed to have been unsuccessful.
- AFP/wm
