N. Korea's test threat launches uproar

North Korea may have achieved what it was planning all along when it poised its long-range Taepodong II missile for launch: an uproar in the United States and Japan over the possibility of a test flight into the northern Pacific beyond Japan.

The strategy, in the view of analysts here, was to gain the attention needed to try to draw the United States into negotiations on the North's terms – and also deepen the rift between the United States and South Korea, which is intent on pursuing reconciliation with the North.

"Kim Jong Il wants to demonstrate his leadership," says Kim Koo Sub, senior researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses here. "He wants instability in the US-South Korea alliance" – a precursor to eventual withdrawal of the remaining 29,500 US troops in Korea, as long demanded by Pyongyang.

That aim emerged Wednesday when a senior North Korean diplomat at the UN said he was aware of US concerns about "our missile test launch," but that North Korea was interested in talking one-on-one. The inference was that North Korea would put off test-firing the missile depending on the US response – and then on the outcome of talks.

According to this logic, North Korea was just staking out a basis for negotiations by declaring its right to have a long-range missile and to fire it in violation of its own self-imposed moratorium.

In what has become a dangerous bargaining game, the United States is sure to spurn this overture while demanding that North Korea return to six-party talks designed to get the North to abandon its entire nuclear weapons program – not just the launch of a missile theoretically capable of reaching the US west coast with a nuclear warhead.

Japan, if anything more concerned than the US, since a test-firing would probably send a missile over its country, could be expected to support this position. Japan has warned of "stern measures" in retaliation for a missile.

North Korea, in calling for talks, is not about to consider giving up its nuclear warheads without a massive infusion of aid.

Rather, the North's immediate concern is the ban imposed by the US Treasury on all financial firms doing business with the North. The ban has forced the Banco Delta Asia in Macao, the biggest conduit for $100 "supernotes" counterfeited in the North, to freeze North Korean accounts.

"The US is now strangling North Korea economically," says Kim Tae Woo, also a senior research scholar at the Institute for Defense Analyses, affiliated with South Korea's Defense Ministry. "Their immediate objective is to make the US step back."

Mr. Kim advances that view – and not what he sees as overblown suggestions of a US military response – as the primary reason why the North provoked what has become a "missile crisis."

He says the US missile-defense system would be largely ineffective against a single Taepodong streaking over Japan to a splashdown in the northern Pacific – the furthest the missile is likely to go on a test run even if, when fully fueled, it might some day be able to go as far as the American mainland.

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