Washington – Despite the international stir it caused, some missile experts view the test launch of North Korea’s long-range Taepodong-2 missile as an abject failure and a temporary end to the long-range missile threat North Korea was thought to have posed.
The Taepodong-2 was just one of seven missiles tested Tuesday and Wednesday. The decision to launch it sandwiched amid other flights of shorter-range, far more reliable North Korean Scud missiles may well have been an effort by the regime of Kim Jong-Il to minimize any problems the Taepodong might experience.
But experience them it did. The missile, whose estimated range would allow it to reach the United States with a modest warhead, failed “on its own shortly after launch,” according to the U.S. Northern Command, which monitored the test flights using radar.
“The main thing that happened yesterday was that their theoretical long-range missile failed, and it remains a theoretical capability,” said Joseph Cirincione, a proliferation specialist with the Center for American Progress.
“The lesson I draw from this is that I feel safer today than I did yesterday. North Korea has demonstrated that it does not have a long-range missile capability.”
As details of the tests became clearer, officials searched for the reasons behind the secretive regime’s abrupt decision to launch its missiles. The tests may have been an attempt to gain leverage in bargaining with other nations, as well as to learn more about the capabilities of the Taepodong-2.
“A good guess is that these missile tests were primarily aimed at improving North Korea’s bargaining position in these negotiations, both to re-engage in the negotiations and to increase the price that Kim Jong-Il would ask to end these programs,” Cirincione said.
But the failure of the Taepodong-2 missile, Cirincione said, means that Kim Jong-Il’s strategy “has backfired on them. They were hoping to demonstrate the capability to reach out and threaten the United States and, in fact, they demonstrated the opposite.” North Korea will have less, not more, leverage in future talks, he said.
