dck
加入时间: 2004/04/02
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作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Missile issue could launch crisis
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Possible N. Korean test heightens tension
By EVAN OSNOS
Chicago Tribune
6/20/2006
Click to view larger picture
File photo
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warns launching a missile would be seen as a provocation.
Click to view larger picture
Associated Press
A South Korean woman walks past models in Seoul Monday of North Korea's Scud-B missile, right, at the Korea War Memorial Museum as tension over a real Communist missile mounts.
BEIJING - A North Korean test launch of a missile potentially able to reach the United States would catapult the Korean Peninsula crisis back into the spotlight and leave the Bush administration with little leverage to respond, analysts say.
As a flurry of published reports Monday suggested Pyongyang had finished fueling a missile and could be on the verge of a launch, the United States and Japan implored the North not to fire its first flight test in eight years.
Testing a missile would effectively end three years of ailing negotiations, analysts say, and mark the lowest point for U.S. and North Korean relations since talks began.
"North Korea has imposed a moratorium on launching missiles," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "We hope it will continue that moratorium and we hope it also will abide by commitments it made" last year to dismantle nuclear arms and end further development.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Monday that "it would be a very serious matter and indeed a provocative act" if North Korea tested a missile.
She said the United States is working closely with its allies on the problem but did not say what might be done if North Korea tested the missile.
While the Communist North's rationale might be hard to grasp in Washington, Kim Jong Il watchers say the North Korean leader could be angling for specific benefits: A high-profile missile test could deliver a political boost at home, divide world powers over the appropriate reaction and renew attention from a Bush administration that has been consumed with Iraq and Iran.
"The pattern with North Korea is that they don't like to be ignored, and right now they think the U.S. is not taking them seriously enough," said Peter Beck, a Seoul-based analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Under pressure from abroad, Kim must also play to his domestic audience, and a high-profile high-tech launch would rally military and civilian support.
"It makes sense domestically," said Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea expert at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
Pyongyang has grown increasingly frustrated in the seven months since negotiators from the United States, China and the rest of the nations in the six-party talks last met. North Korea has refused to return to the bargaining table so long as the United States is putting new financial pressure on the regime, by accusing powerful companies of money laundering and counterfeiting of U.S. currency.
In the meantime, Pyongyang has watched Washington's focus shift to Iran, culminating this month when the White House offered to convene direct talks with Iran over its nuclear program, something North Korea has sought for years. The day after the United States made its offer to Iran, North Korea issued an invitation for direct talks with Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator on the North's nuclear weapons program, but the United States rejected the offer.
A test would be the North's first major launch since 1998, when it sent a Taepodong-1 missile over Japanese territory. Pyongyang later adopted a self-imposed test moratorium, but it continued its development of a nuclear weapons program. It is unknown whether the nuclear devices that North Korea claims to have developed could be small and light enough to equip a missile.
Likewise, little is known about what North Korea might be doing. Media reports in the United States, Seoul and Tokyo have cited satellite images and unnamed officials suggesting that the North appears to have erected and fueled a 116-foot-long ballistic missile system, the Taepodong-2, on a pad in the country's eastern reaches. Some commentators have argued that technical demands would require a fully fueled missile to be fired within a day or two; others say it could wait up to a month.
Either way, the United States and allies have little recourse. U.S. and Japanese diplomats Monday publicly warned that, in the event of a launch, they might refer the North to the United Nations Security Council and seek economic sanctions. Yet, analysts note that is unlikely to succeed.
North Korea could describe the test as a satellite launch, making it hard for countries such as Japan and Russia, which have their own space programs, to condemn it.
However, Japan says a new launch would threaten Japanese security and violate an agreement North Korea signed in 2002 and reaffirmed in 2004.
作者：dck 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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Missile issue could launch crisis
