North Korea said early Wednesday that it had successfully put its first military spy satellite into orbit, state-run media reported, after a rocket carrying the payload passed over the Japanese archipelago late Tuesday, triggering a strong condemnation from Tokyo.
South Korea's military said the North's military reconnaissance satellite was believed to have entered orbit, but it would take time to assess whether it was operating normally.
Japanese and U.S. officials, however, said that they were continuing to analyze the launch — Pyongyang's third attempt this year to put a spy satellite into orbit — and could not immediately determine whether the rocket launch or the satellite mission had been successful.
"The government is at this point not confirming whether the satellite had entered into an orbit around the Earth," Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told a regular news conference Wednesday, more than 12 hours after the launch.
Matsuno, the Japanese government’s top spokesman, said making that determination could take “a considerable amount of time” since it would “require a comprehensive and specialized analysis.”
Earlier Wednesday, the North characterized the launch — overseen by leader Kim Jong Un — as a "legitimate" move aimed at bolstering its "self-defense capabilities" and said the country would launch additional satellites "in a short span of time," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
"The carrier rocket 'Chollima-1' flew normally along the preset flight track and accurately put the reconnaissance satellite 'Malligyong-1' on its orbit at 22:54:13, 705s after the launch," the report said.
The reclusive nation had fallen short during launch attempts in May and August, blaming those failures on technical mishaps.
Later Wednesday, KCNA said Kim had viewed images of U.S. military facilities on the island of Guam during a visit to the country's space agency headquarters.
Kim viewed "photos of Anderson Air Force Base, Apra Harbor and other major military bases of the U.S. forces taken in the sky above Guam in the Pacific, which were received at 9:21 a.m. on Nov. 22.," the report said.
Guam, which hosts what the U.S. military calls a "continuous bomber presence" and would play a key role in any war on the Korean Peninsula, has been repeatedly singled by Pyongyang as a threat to the Kim regime.
During Kim's visit, officials also briefed him on the status of the satellite, telling him that it would "formally start its reconnaissance mission from December 1 after finishing 7 to 10 days' fine-tuning process."
Meanwhile, Seoul’s Cabinet announced that it would partially suspend a landmark 2018 inter-Korean military agreement from the afternoon in response to the launch, and resume reconnaissance and surveillance activities around the border. That move was endorsed by President Yoon Suk-yeol.
"North Korea is clearly demonstrating that it has no will to abide by the Sept. 19 military agreement designed to reduce military tension on the Korean Peninsula and to build trust," South Korean Prime Minister Han Duk-soo said following a Cabinet meeting.
The pact, known as the Comprehensive Military Agreement, was signed at a summit between then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korea’s Kim. Under the deal, the two sides agreed to impose buffer zones where live-fire drills were suspended, no-fly zones were implemented and some guard posts were removed, among other measures.
But the agreement has faced calls to be scrapped or suspended, with critics saying it constrains Seoul's ability to monitor North Korean actions near the border.
Wednesday’s decision “allows the Yoon administration to step away from the previous administration’s confidence-building measures that disproportionately benefited the Kim regime and which Pyongyang has violated numerous times,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul.
A return of South Korean surveillance drone operations along the border “should produce more useful intelligence than North Korea’s rudimentary satellite program,” Easley said, adding that Pyongyang would likely use those drone flights “as an excuse for further military provocations.”
The North has now attempted seven satellite launches since 1998, with just two — not including the latest — appearing to have been successfully placed in orbit, the last in 2016.
Observers routinely urge caution in taking North Korea's claims at face value, since the regime has a long history of embellishing its accomplishments, especially in the military arena.
But success or not, Japan said the satellite launch amounted to a new page in Pyongyang's playbook, following its "unprecedented" spate of missile tests over nearly two years.
"In addition to the series of provocative actions that have continued at a high frequency, this latest launch — which passed over the Japanese archipelago — poses an even more serious and imminent threat to Japan's national security, as well as that of the region, and is a serious challenge to the international community as a whole," Matsuno told a separate news conference earlier Wednesday.
Although there were no reports of harm or damage, he said that the launch had endangered the safety not only of aircraft and ships, but also of Japanese citizens, since the rocket had separated into two parts after it was fired from North Korea's Tongchang-ri area, home to its Sohae Satellite Launching Station.
Matsuno said the first part of the rocket had fallen into the East China Sea, some 350 kilometers west of the Korean Peninsula, while a second part had passed between Okinawa Prefecture's main island and the island of Miyako — briefly triggering Japan's J-Alert warning system for residents to take shelter — before splashing down some 1,200 km southwest of Okinotori Island, a remote atoll in an area of the Pacific far outside of Japan's exclusive economic zone.
While South Korea has said Pyongyang is providing Moscow with weapons in exchange for Russian space technology know-how — something Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared to suggest in September during a rare meeting with Kim — Japan said Wednesday that it was continuing to analyze whether Moscow provided the North with technical help.
Both Moscow and Pyongyang have denied the exchanges, but Victor Cha and Ellen Kim, experts on the two Koreas at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said Tuesday’s relative success was “the direct result of assistance from Russia.”
Kim’s visit to the Vostochny Cosmodrome spaceport in September — his first stop on the Russia trip — “evinced a clear priority in what he wanted from Putin in terms of military satellite technology and a space program,” they wrote in an analysis. “The failure of North Korea’s two previous attempts signifies a strong causal connection between Russian support and the pre-summit and post-summit launch results.”
Speaking to reporters in Tokyo late Tuesday, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida did not address the alleged North Korea-Russia links, but condemned the launch "in the strongest possible terms," calling it "a serious situation that concerns the safety of our nation's citizens."
"Even if (the launch) was called a satellite, it used ballistic missile technology," he said. "This is a clear violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions."
Pyongyang is prohibited from conducting ballistic missile launches under United Nations Security Council resolutions, but has in the past said these measures do not cover its nominally civilian space program. Japan, South Korea and the U.S., however, view the launch of satellites as a thinly veiled means of advancing its missile program, since similar technology is employed.
The White House also criticized the launch, labeling it "a brazen violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions."
"This space launch involved technologies that are directly related to the DPRK intercontinental ballistic missile program," White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
In the days ahead of the launch, Tokyo and Seoul had demanded that the North immediately halt preparations for firing the rocket.
Tokyo had deployed countermeasures in preparation for a potential shootdown of the rocket or debris, sending PAC-3 ground-based missile-defense batteries to Okinawa's Miyako, Ishigaki and Yonaguni islands, while also deploying Maritime Self-Defense Force Aegis destroyers — which are equipped with SM-3 interceptors — to waters around Japan.
Separately Wednesday, the South Korean military announced the arrival of a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine at its Jeju Naval Base on the southern resort island. That announcement came just a day after Seoul said the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier was visiting the South Korean naval base in the port city of Busan.
North Korea’s state-run media has called the country’s spy satellite program an "indispensable" measure to counter U.S. and allied “space militarization.”
The North has been seeking to put a military reconnaissance satellite into orbit as part of a broader modernization plan to monitor U.S. and allied forces, though defense experts say doing so can be exceedingly difficult.
Observers also say it’s unclear how advanced a North Korean satellite would be, considering the daunting challenges of camera performance, hard-to-come-by components and limited time windows for snapping shots of military sites.
“There are many reasons to be skeptical about what North Korean authorities say about their satellite,” said Ewha University's Easley. “State-controlled media claims of a successful launch do not mean the satellite will actually perform meaningful reconnaissance functions.”
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