Related News
North Korea follows bomb with rocket test
Print Edition
NORTH Korea has successfully tested a new, high-powered rocket engine, state media said yesterday, a move South Korea said was designed to showcase North Korea’s progress toward being able to target America’s East Coast.
The ground test comes less than two weeks after Pyongyang detonated what it said was a miniaturized atomic bomb.
Taken together, the two tests raise the prospect that Pyongyang could be inching toward its ultimate goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile that could hit Washington DC.
North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA trumpeted the engine test, which it said would give the country “sufficient carrier capability for launching various kinds of satellites.”
Rocket engines are easily re-purposed for use in missiles, and outside observers say Pyongyang’s space program is a fig leaf for weapons tests.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un hailed the test and called for more rocket launches to turn the country into a “possessor of geostationary satellites in a couple of years to come,” KCNA said.
A geostationary satellite must be propelled to an altitude of 36,000 kilometers, a Unification Ministry official was quoted as saying by South Korea’s official Yonhap news agency.
“The distance to the eastern part of the United States is some 12,000 kilometers. North Korea is thus showing off its ability” to hit the US East Coast, the South Korean official added.
Rocket scientist Chae Yeon-Seok at South Korea’s Aerospace Research Institute said such an engine would represent “a technical leap forward” in developing launch vehicles.
It suggests North Korea was “coming close to having an inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could hit the US mainland.”
Pyongyang regularly parades homegrown missiles and boasts of its plan to develop long-range missiles capable of targeting America.
It has already carried out a series of long-range missile tests presented as satellite launches, most recently in February, and has fired missiles from a submarine.
A proven submarine-launched ballistic missile system would allow deployment far beyond the Korean peninsula and a “second-strike” capability in the event of an attack on the North’s military bases.
After supervising the test at the country’s Sohae satellite-launching site, Kim Jong Un called on officials, scientists and technicians “to round off the preparations for launching the satellite as soon as possible,” KCNA reported.
North Korea has been hit by five sets of United Nations sanctions since it first tested a nuclear device in 2006.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
