Missile Launch Was Factor Before U.S. Pact With North Korea
Less than six weeks after North Korea signed an accord with the Obama administration to limit its nuclear activities, the rogue nation is poised to launch a long-range rocket — raising questions about why the North went to the trouble to negotiate in the first place.
Even more ominous than the firing of the ballistic missile equipped with a satellite, is the likelihood of a follow-up nuclear detonation that may well be a test of a new weapon built with highly enriched uranium.
In moving ahead with the launch of the rocket, which according to reports was being readied with fuel Wednesday, North Korea was in many respects behaving as usual: willfully, without regard for United Nations resolutions, and paying no heed to its biggest patron, China. Just as the former leader, Kim Jong-il, flouted the Bush and early Obama administrations, so is the new leader, his son, Kim Jung-un, defying the Obama White House.
North Korea insists that the launch is for the peaceful purpose of sending a satellite into orbit, but almost universally the test is seen as a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding North Korea refrain from firing rockets using ballistic missile technology.
But the situation looked different on Feb. 29, when North Korea promised to suspend nuclear weapons tests and allow international inspectors into the country and the United States pledged to send hundreds of thousands of North Koreans desperately needed nutritional assistance.
When the new State Department negotiator on North Korea, Glyn Davies, sat down in Beijing to talk to the North Koreans in late February, he sat opposite a veteran North Korean diplomat, Kim Kye-gwan.
According to Evans Revere, a former principal deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department, Mr. Davies told his North Korean counterpart that a satellite launch would be a violation of whatever agreement they made.
“Administration officials have told me that the D.P.R.K. side understood clearly and accepted the U.S. position that a satellite launch would be violation of the Feb. 29’s agreement’s ban on long range missile tests,” Mr. Revere said, using the acronym for the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.