"Mystery Object in the April Sky"

What was it that North Korea launched on 5 April: Taepodong-2 (an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of, and perhaps designed to threaten Japan and the US), or Kwangmyongsong-2 (an experimental communications satellite, designed to broadcast revolutionary songs)? Whatever it was, it attracted the world's attention, and an enormous concentration of hostile military force -ships, submarines, surveillance aircraft, satellites and radar systems of the US, Japan and South Korea-before disappearing, either into space or the Pacific Ocean.

North Korea's insists that its goal is to become a "strong and prosperous country"(强盛大國) by 2012, and that its April launch was within its legal rights. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 guarantees all nations the absolute right to scientific exploration of space, and North Korea observed the necessary legal niceties, including advance notice to the appropriate international maritime and aviation bodies (IMO and ICAO).

Major governments -notably Japan and the US- denied that North Korea had such a right, insisting that, even if the launch object was a satellite, it was forbidden under Security Council Resolution No 1718, adopted in the wake of North Korea's missile and nuclear tests of 2006, which banned any "missile-related activity."

After the launch, Japan promptly called on the Security Council to take appropriate punitive measures, but the Council was divided. China and Russia, both with veto rights, were not persuaded that the 2006 Security Council resolution could extinguish a right guaranteed by the 1967 treaty. Most likely the Council would confine itself to a mild response, such as a reaffirmation of the principles of the 2006 resolution. Since that resolution has been mostly ignored, with not a single country reporting any step in its implementation now for over a year, restatement could scarcely make much difference.

Most global media assumed North Korea was somehow at fault. However, apart from the technical question of interpretation of conflicting rules, the launch has to be seen within a broader context. Almost nobody believes that North Korea poses a threat of aggression. Instead, it is obsessed with security and the search for an absolute guarantee of immunity from attack by its enemies. It is a kind of "porcupine state," resisting foreign bodies by stiffening its quills, not an expanding or rampaging one. Second, blame for the breakdown in the multilateral Beijing negotiations and the stalling of Phase 2 of the February 2007 agreement attaches to other parties at least as much as to Pyongyang. It protests that it meticulously performed its agreed obligations only to have the US add fresh, and unacceptable, demands (on verification). It was also angry and disappointed that the Obama administration, coming to power promising negotiations and "new" diplomacy, instead went ahead during March with war games rehearsing renewed peninsular war.

North Korean interest in negotiations diminishes as other parties attempt to narrow the focus to its nuclear and missile programs (or, in the Japanese case, abductions) and grows as the agenda incorporates comprehensive normalization, a treaty to end the Korean War, multilateral economic cooperation, and Japanese reparations for colonialism. The current impasse owes largely to factors beyond its control: elections and new governments in the US and South Korea and peculiar Japanese domestic considerations.

North Korea has learned that nothing succeeds so much in attracting American attention, even earning a grudging respect, as the maintenance of high-level military preparedness. As Leon Sigal wrote (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 2009), "Whenever the United States fails to keep its side of the bargain, North Korea is quick to retaliate -in 1998 Pyongyang sought the means to enrich uranium and test a long- range Taepodong missile; in 2003 its reignited its plutonium program; in 2006 it test-launched a Taepodong and conducted a nuclear test; and last August it suspended disablement of its Yongbyon facilities and threatened to resume plutonium production." In other words, if its Taepodong brought the US to the negotiating table in 1998 and its nuclear test opened the way towards comprehensive agreements in 2006, could not a similar outcome be expected in 2009? Its tactics would therefore be better seen not as recalcitrance, blackmail, or belligerence, but as a calculated response to American intimidation.

As for South Korea, it is of course the most affected by events in the North, but has little capacity at the moment to influence events because South-North relations are at a nadir. North Korea is angry at the efforts of the Lee Myung-bak government to distance itself from "Sunshine" politics, even to the extent of being unwilling to honor the joint South-North declarations (on cooperation) of June 2000 and October 2007. Following the launch, Seoul joined the call for a "stern" international response, but it also softened its rhetoric and declared readiness to resume negotiations with the North. Many in South Korea may also have been impressed that Pyongyang had stolen a march on it, since a southern satellite launch (heavily reliant on Russian cooperation) is not expected till July.

As for Japan, North Korea has been a major preoccupation at least since Taepodong-1 flashed unheralded across its skies in 1998. Japan's stance differs crucially from that of other parties at Beijing. It alone fiercely opposed the late Bush government's switch to negotiations and the thaw that came over the US-North Korea relationship. It tried long, though unsuccessfully, to persuade the US to share its view that the abduction of its citizens three decades ago should be included on the Beijing agenda, while to its own people it even insisted that the abduction issue was more important than nuclear weapons or missiles. After the 2007 agreements in Beijing, it made huge diplomatic efforts to block or delay their implementation, first pressing the Bush administration not to remove North Korea from the list of terror-supporting states and then refusing to meet its own obligation to provide heavy oil to North Korea.

On 5 April, while ordinary people enjoyed cherry-blossom parties, the launch infuriated and humiliated the Japanese establishment. Its years of efforts to squeeze Pyongyang into capitulation had been fruitless. It had got nowhere on the abduction issue, failed to persuade the US to share its hard-line or its view of the abductions as the key North Korean crime, failed to stop the launch, failed to persuade the world that it was decisively military rather than civil in character, and now, it likely was going to fail to exact a satisfactory resolution of condemnation from the Security Council. Furthermore, despite Japan's severe sanctions policy, North Korea's launch seemed to indicate that its scientific and military agenda was little affected. Perhaps nothing could be bitterer for Japanese bureaucrats than the prospect that North Korea might be moving towards the capacity to launch spy satellites over Japan, as Japan regularly does over North Korea.

Prime Minister Aso's tough posturing, and his orders to shoot down any debris from the launch, seems to have raised his domestic support levels and improved his prospects, however slightly, for the forthcoming election. It might also help him "sell" to the electorate more of the unproven and hugely expensive missile defense systems, and perhaps boost the case for constitutional revision and full-scale Japanese rearmament. But such steps merely threaten deeper instability for Japan or the region. History shows that Pyongyang responds tit-for-tat to punitive measures, if anything using them to tighten the screws of repression. Only when the distortions, violence and wounds of the past and present of the peninsula and its surrounding region, and the grievances of all parties, including North Korea, are addressed can there be any lasting peace and stability.