"Launch Was Factor Before U.S. Pact With North Korea
By JANE PERLEZ
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
The North Korean space agency's General Launch Command Center on the outskirts of Pyongyang on Wednesday.
HONG KONG — 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.
Mr. Revere said he had been told by North Korean contacts as early as December that the regime planned a satellite launch, though no date was given. The information was so alarming that he passed it to the Obama administration before Mr. Davies headed out to Beijing to meet Mr. Kim, Mr. Revere said.
The North Korean negotiator left Beijing knowing that if a satellite launch went ahead, the accord would not last, Mr. Revere said.
Putting the best face on the North Korean disregard for the Feb. 29 agreement, an Asian diplomat with long experience in dealing with North Korea, who requested anonymity in order not to fracture relations with North Korean officials, said it was possible that Mr. Kim, a Foreign Ministry official, was not told of the North Korean's military plans for a satellite missile launch.
The regime in Pyongyang was strictly compartmentalized. There continued to be competing factions under Kim Jong-un, the new leader still in his late 20s, and a four-star general in an estimated million-man army in which he has never served, the diplomat said.
During a recent meeting with the Chinese leader, Hu Jintao in Seoul, South Korea, President Obama pressed Mr. Hu to help persuade the North Koreans to forego the missile test, administration officials said.
China, Mr. Obama said at a news conference in Seoul, should stop showing a "blind eye" to the North Korean nuclear ambitions.
During an interview on a Web chat Wednesday with the newspaper, People's Daily, the director general of the Department of Asian Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Luo Zhaohui, said that once North Korea launched the satellite, " 'the verbal fight' will be very intense."
"Seeking a political and diplomatic solution will be the wise choice of all parties — a 'military fight' will not be in the interest of any party."
Privately, according to American experts who follow the matter closely, the Chinese have also pressed the North Koreans to hold off. But in a year when China is undergoing a once in a decade leadership change, pushing North Korea is not at the top of the agenda.
Moreover, as much as Washington relies on China to carry messages to North Korea, China, in the long run, has a different agenda. For China, pressuring the regime to the point of destabilization could result in refugees flooding across its border. A united Korean peninsula that might result from a fragmented North Korea and a vibrant South Korea united under an American umbrella is seen as the ultimate menace for China.
International scorn for the expected ballistic missile launch by North Korea is likely to be loud and clear. But there maybe not much more than a statement from the president of the United Nations Security Council — a post held this month by the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice.
The major powers are now looking beyond that, and attempting to figure out effective punishment if North Korea goes ahead with a follow up test of a nuclear bomb. It would be the third detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea since 2006.
This time, says Jonathan D. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the author of a book on North Korea, "No Exit," the bomb will likely be built with highly enriched uranium, not plutonium as in the previous two tests.
The biggest conundrum about the enriched uranium is the source of its production, Mr. Pollack said. There are deep suspicions that North Korea has several undeclared facilities for enriching uranium where it will not allow international inspectors or visitors, he said.
"If North Korea is able to produce highly enriched uranium for a weapon, it will be one more instance of openly deceiving the outside world, including China, its most important economic and political benefactor," Mr. Pollack said.
If the North Koreans proceed with the nuclear explosion, what will the international community do?" said Douglas Paal, the director of the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "North Korea is a land of lousy options."
The toughest sanctions will be reserved for the nuclear test, he said. But even those, he said, will probably be ineffective because North Korea is already so heavily sanctioned there is not much room for new ones.
Bree Feng contributed research from Beijing."
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