SEOUL — Contrary to the reaction from Washington and Tokyo, experts in Seoul and Moscow believe that North Korea’s launch of Scud, Rodong and Taepodong-2 missiles was a major success both technically and politically.
Meanwhile, Russia has revealed its eagerness to sell information and technology to North Korea for use in Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
Alexei Grigoriev, deputy director of Russia’s Federal Information Technologies Agency, told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass that Moscow was interested in “establishing contacts with the Korean side and discussing future cooperation."
Grigoriev cited as an example the sale of sophisticated gear to store and transport nuclear material. The company, Atlas, also was revealed to have opened talks with North Korea on encryption technology and security systems.
Jang Sung-Min, moderator of the radio program “Today,” said that Pyongyang may have demonstrated its capability to strike Japan or the U.S. if it so desired, and that Washington must be concerned about Venezuelan President Chavez’s visit to Pyongyang later this month.
“It’s clear Chavez is interested in the missiles and if North Korean missiles end up in Venezuela, you can bet they will find their way to Cuba. If that happens, it will pose a real threat to the U.S,” he said. Some years ago in Seoul there were rumors that Kim’s second son, Jong-Chol, was in Cuba and his mission was to discuss missiles.
Cho said the United States downplayed the North Korean missile technology to avoid raising the commercial value of North Korean missiles among potentially interested, anti-American countries.
Politically, North Korea managed to gain an even bigger triumph, analysts said.
“To the outside, Pyongyang demonstrated that it had more than a couple of missiles, that their arsenal is bigger than than either the outside world or North Koreans think," said Kim Young-Soo, a North Korea expert at Sogang University in Seoul.
"The North Korean regime succeeded in quelling discontentment among the people. If Kim Jong-Il yielded to the American pressure and called off the test firing, North Korean people would have thought their leader is cowardly. As it is, Kim became bigger to their eyes” he said.
Grigoriev was quoted as saying that North Korea wanted high-tech items to counter the “threat posed by international terrorism."
The London Daily Telegraph cited sources close to the proposed sale as viewing it as “evidence of Russia’s secret support for its Soviet-era ally, which was once a bulwark against Chinese influence in the Far East."
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Kim Jong-Il 'became bigger' in the eyes of the North Korean people.
CNN
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“It has been eight years since North Korea succeeded in launching Taepodong-1," said Min Cho, a senior researcher at the Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU).
"They have been fine-tuning the missile technology. It’s premature to determine Taepodong-2 failed. Rather, it’s certain that Pyongyang need not and did not want to send it near the U.S. territory and invite more international pressure. Knowing fully well that the U.S. satellites were watching and would know immediately that it was an ICBM, they needed not make it fly 6,000 kilometers,” Cho said during a radio talk show on Peace Broadcasting Company (PBC).
“Pyongyang demonstrated that it had technology to determine the landing spots of their missiles, be they short-range, medium-range or long-range,” Kim said. “The Taepodong-2 was clearly pointing towards the United States, but it was made not to travel that far.”
