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Monday, February 8, 2016
North Korean Nuke-Capable Missile Could Hit U.S. and Be Sold to Iran

Existential Threat
North Korean Nuke-Capable Missile Could Hit U.S. and Be Sold to Iran
The launch on Sunday is another sign of Pyongyang’s growing threat, and the
impotence of U.S. and global efforts to stop it.
Gordon G. Chang The Daily Beast 02.08.16 10:56 AM ET
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/08/north-korea-s-missile-could-hit-u-s.html

On Sunday, North Korea completed its second-in-a-row successful test of a
three-stage launcher, showing the regime’s mastery of an especially complex
technology.

Pyongyang claims it put an earth observation satellite — the
Kwangmyongsong-4 — in a polar orbit. More likely, the object now circling
the earth is a decoy. In 2012, after the North’s last long-range test, it
announced it had put a communications satellite in space. No signal,
however, has ever been detected from the device.

That “satellite,” and the one launched this week, are about the same weight
as a nuclear warhead, and that was the point of these elaborate exercises.
North Korea has been putting dead objects in orbit so that it can test, in
violation of four sets of UN Security Council resolutions, its ballistic
missile technology under the guise of a civilian rocket program.

The rocket the North Koreans call the Unha-3 was probably the most advanced
version of their Taepodong missile. It appears, from the location of Sunday’s
splashdown zones, that the launcher has a range of 10,000 kilometers, the
same as that of the 2012 version.

Some have taken comfort that the North Koreans have not improved the reach
of their missile, but that would be a mistake. “This test launch took less
time to set up and was conducted more covertly than any other launch in
North Korean history,” notes North Korea analyst Bruce Bechtol, in comments
circulated to The Daily Beast and others on Sunday.

Up to now, the North’s longest-range missile was never much of a weapon. It
required weeks to transport, assemble, fuel, and test before launch. The
calculus was that the U.S., in a wartime setting, would have plenty of time
to destroy the launcher on the ground.

The North Koreans since 2012 have obviously been able to compress the cycle.
This time, Pyongyang moved up the launch window and sent the Unha-3 into
space on the window’s first day, surprising just about every observer.

That means, of course, the North Koreans are perfecting their launch skills,
thereby decreasing on-the-ground vulnerability.

The Taepodong is still an easy target before launch, but once it reaches the
edge of space it becomes fearsome. It has the range to make a dent in more
than half of the continental United States. If its warhead is nuclear and
explodes high above the American homeland, an electromagnetic pulse could
disable electronics across vast swatches of the country.

The American intelligence community does not think the North Koreans have
built a miniaturized nuclear warhead to go along with the Taepodong yet, but
it’s clear they are on their way to developing such a device. The launch
this week was one month and one day after their fourth nuclear detonation.
Pyongyang, for all the snickering and derision it attracts, is capable of
sneaking up on us and becoming an existential threat.

Why has the United States, the most powerful nation in history, not been
able to stop destitute North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs? As
Stapleton Roy, the former American diplomat told me in 2004, “No one has
found a way to persuade North Korea to move in sensible directions.”

Certainly not the Obama administration. A multi-faceted bargain in 2012, the
so-called Leap Day deal, fell apart weeks after it was put in place, when
Kim Jong-un, the ruler of the despotic state, launched what his regime
called a rocket.

Then a new approach, backed by existing sanctions, also failed to produce
results. The White House during this phase essentially left North Korea
alone, ignoring Kim with a policy now known as “strategic patience.” It has
been more like “strategic paralysis,” as David Maxwell of Georgetown
University’s Center for Security Studies aptly termed it after the Sunday
launch.

The evident failure of the current administration follows failures of
different kinds by its two immediate predecessors. These days, like in past
ones, American officials tell us how the North’s actions are “unacceptable,”
the words of Secretary of State John Kerry, or “flagrant,” the term used by
National Security Advisor Susan Rice, but the U.S. never seems to do
anything effective.

Similarly, an emergency session of the Security Council on Sunday “strongly
condemned” the launch but did nothing else. The UN still has not imposed any
sanctions for the Jan. 6 detonation of what North Korea claims is a
“hydrogen” device. Veto-wielding Beijing has made it clear it will not
support a fifth set of UN sanctions.

Ultimately, the problem, as Maxwell notes, is that no country wants to
pressure Kim so much that either he decides he has nothing to lose and go to
war or his decrepit state falls apart, causing tragedy of a different sort.
Yet as long as the Kim family regime stays in power, it will continue to
build horrific weapons.

“What North Korea wants most,” said Ashton Carter before he became secretary
of defense “is oddly to be left alone, to run this rather odd country, a
throwback to Stalinism.” If that were indeed true, President Obama’s
strategic patience would have worked by now. Yet the North’s leaders are not
content to misrule their 25 million subjects. They have institutionalized
crisis.

When we examine evidence of the most recent crisis — scraps of the missile
that fell into the sea Sunday and flight data — we will probably learn the
North Koreans in fact tested their new 80-ton booster, which they have been
developing for at least two years. It is almost certain Iran has paid for
its development.

That’s why Bechtol, author of North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim
Jong-un Era, thinks America in the months ahead should be looking for
evidence of sales of the new missile to Iran. Larry Niksch of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies told the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs in July that North Korea earns “upwards of two to three billion
dollars annually from Iran for the various forms of collaboration between
them.”

Even if one thinks Washington should not sanction North Korea to the brink
of war or collapse, the U.S. at a minimum needs to stop sales of the
launcher North Korea fired off this week. The Bush administration’s
Proliferation Security Initiative, a comprehensive program to stop such
transfers, has languished in Washington in recent years.

At this point, American policymakers are not trying very hard to stop North
Korea’s trade in dangerous weapons. That, to borrow a phrase, is
unacceptable.

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