Rocket launch underlines Kim Jong-un’s ability to sidestep UN sanctions and suggests ballistic missile building abilities have reached a higher level
North Korea is already believed to be capable of striking the US mainland with a nuclear weapon; now it claims that it can spy on enemy troops, after state media reported the regime’s first successful launch of a surveillance satellite, drawing an immediate response from South Korea.
While Japan, South Korea and the US could not immediately confirm if the satellite’s payload had entered orbit late on Tuesday, a North Korean presence in space would add to military tensions on the peninsula and highlight the ineffectiveness of international sanctions.
Hours after the North’s space agency claimed its Chollima-1 rocket had “accurately placed” the Malligyong-1 satellite into orbit, the South said it was partially suspending an agreement designed to lower cross-border tensions. The defence ministry in Seoul said it would also resume aerial surveillance activities near the countries’ heavily armed border.
North Korea could use satellites to more effectively target South Korea and Japan or conduct damage assessments during a war, according to Ankit Panda at the US-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But even if, as some experts believe, the satellite is not technologically advanced enough to conduct military reconnaissance, it underlines Pyongyang’s ability to sidestep UN sanctions targeting its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes – possibly with help from another internationally isolated regime: the Kremlin.
While the launch differed from the volley of ballistic missile tests overseen by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in the past two years, it drew on the same technologies the regime uses to test its increasingly sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
That will only generate further unease in Seoul, Tokyo and Washington, where officials quickly condemned North Korea’s latest provocation.
