North Korea's satellite claim means ICBM threat is real at last

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 (UPI) -- North Korea says its planned satellite launch is for civilian purposes only. That claim is an obvious one. As Mandy Rice-Davies replied when told that Lord Astor, a member of the British House of Lords, denied sleeping with her, "He would, wouldn't he?"

North Korea's National Space Committee announced Tuesday in Pyongyang that its "Unha-2 will put communications satellite Kwangmyongsong-2 into orbit."

North Korea claimed in 1998 to have successfully launched its first satellite, but no independent evidence was ever received that it had in fact succeeded in doing so on that occasion.

The North Korean announcement certainly will come up in the talks between U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, the first foreign head of government to visit Obama in Washington since he was inaugurated.

The simple fact is that if a country can build a multistage missile powerful enough to carry a satellite into orbit around the Earth, it also can use that same missile, with a few minor adaptations, to fire a nuclear warhead many thousands of miles.

That truth has been self-evident since the beginning of the Space Age more than 52 years ago. Once the Soviet Union had finally developed its breakthrough R-7 booster to put Sputnik 1, the first ever Earth-orbiting satellite, into orbit in October 1957, the success of its intercontinental ballistic missile program to target the United States and its Western European allies was assured.

Until Sputnik 1 was launched, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower was skeptical about both ICBMs and the U.S. civilian space program. But Sputnik 1 was a traumatic wake-up call. After that, federal money by the billions of dollars flooded into both programs in a desperate race to catch up.

The interoperability between civilian satellite launching capabilities and military ICBMs immediately carried over into the U.S. programs as well. As Heritage Foundation analyst Ariel Cohen pointed out in a recent paper, it was the Jupiter-C booster developed by Wernher von Braun and his team for the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency that ended a spate of embarrassing failures by the U.S. civilian space program and that finally put Explorer 1, the first U.S. orbiting satellite, into orbit to match the Soviets in February 1958.

That same interoperability and transfer of capability between ostensibly civilian space programs and clearly military ones has been followed by many countries since. India's success in launching satellites into space on its own domestically produced boosters was the flipside of its long, arduous struggle to develop Agni-V, an ICBM that can target most of China.

Iran's success this month in putting its own first satellite into orbit confounded the complacent assumptions of last year's U.S. National Intelligence Estimate and instead confirmed that Iran right now has the capability -- or is on the verge of getting it -- to successfully fire ICBMs that could reach the Eastern Seaboard of the United States with nuclear or thermonuclear warheads.

The close proximity in timing between the Iranian satellite launch and the confident North Korean announcement that it is about to launch a satellite too may be no coincidence.

North Korea and Iran have quietly done their utmost to mutually support and supply each other's nuclear and space programs for many years, probably well over a decade. And they also could trade through the middleman proliferation network set up by A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear program. North Korea and Iran both also enjoy close relations with China, whose government has been happy to support both of them as buffers and proxies to combat and erode U.S. influence in the Middle East and Northeast Asia.

The North Korean claim at this time came as no surprise to U.S. and South Korean intelligence analysts who monitor the so-called Hermit Kingdom. For several weeks South Korea and the United States have said North Korea was planning to launch something, and the test-firing of a new long-range missile was always the most likely outcome.

The announcement also came at a time when Pyongyang has been ratcheting up its bellicose talk regarding South Korea and how close the countries are to all-out war. Western leaders tend to discount such talk because in the 56 years since the armistice that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War, such an outbreak has never yet occurred.

However, the inauguration of a young, new inexperienced president in the United States in January came at the same time that new, far more hawkish and unpredictable leaders have been rising to prominence on North Korea's dominant National Defense Commission.

As UPI's Lee Jong-Heon reported Feb. 12, Vice Marshal Kim Yong Chun, 73, has been named minister of the People's Armed Forces, or defense minister, replacing Kim Il Chol, who had been in the post since 2000, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

Gen. Ri Yong Ho has been appointed chief of the army's General Staff, equivalent to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Kim Kyok Sik, who had served in the post for the past two years.

Both Vice Marshal Kim and Gen. Ri may be rising to full control over the armed forces at the expense of possibly ailing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Or Kim Jong Il, emboldened by the prospect of achieving his long-coveted ICBM capability at long last, may have gone hawkish himself. In any case, the world cannot afford to ignore or be complacent about the pending North Korean satellite launch and the huge advance in Pyongyang's destructive capabilities that it heralds.