US President Barack Obama views it as a threat and a provocation. Either way, North Korea’s announcement that it will test-fire a long-range missile in mid-April—and speculations of all kinds as to its real motive are aplenty—is sufficient cause for global concern.
Time and again, the reclusive government of North Korea under the Kim dynasty has shown itself to be unreliable in its words and unpredictable in its actions. There is also its little, if any, regard for world opinion as well as its oft-successful parlaying of its notoriousness to get generous concessions from the West and its ethnic neighbor, though rival state, South Korea, not to mention its callous pursuit of a costly nuclear arms program while a vast portion of its population struggled to survive through famine and starvation.
In the run-up to the second international summit of world leaders looking for ways to secure nuclear material from the hands of terrorists, North Korea, invoking the right to pursue a peaceful space program, disclosed the planned test-firing purportedly to launch a satellite into orbit. However, it matched its announcement with harsh rhetoric. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) warned that Seoul’s raising the issue at the summit would be an “absolutely unpardonable criminal act,” and that “any provocative act would be considered a declaration of war against us.”
The planned missile test in April will not be North Korea’s first. In March 2009, it tested a long-range missile; in a sinister move two months later, on May 25, it tested a nuclear weapon—actually its second time after its detonation of a one-kiloton atomic bomb in 2006. Russian defense experts estimated the force of the explosion at 10-20 kilotons, about as powerful as the US atomic bombs that destroyed Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, killing some 120,000 on impact and tens of thousands more by radiation in the months that followed. Right after the test, South Korea claimed, North Korea test-fired successively three short-range missiles. KCNA justified the tests as “part of the republic’s measures to strengthen its nuclear deterrent.”
Most of the world believes that North Korea’s planned satellite launch will be a leap for its nuclear arms program. In fact, there are speculations that North Korea’s new missile, the testing of which is reportedly timed to mark the birth anniversary of Kim Il-sung, the country’s founder, on April 15, may finally enable it to deliver nuclear-armed missiles closer to, if not as far as, Hawaii and Alaska. Already, South Korea, Japan and China are within range of North Korea’s existing missiles. If it proceeds with the test-firing, North Korea will violate a number of United Nations resolutions, among them one banning all ballistic missile-related activities, which was passed in reaction to its 2009 nuclear and missile tests.
As expected, North Korea’s latest stunt has taken much of the focus of the security summit, which opened on Monday, from nuclear terrorism, even as fears persist that North Korea, like Iran, would have no care about passing on nuclear technology and material to terrorists at a time when practically all the world is convinced that weapons of mass annihilation, threatening human survival no less, have no place in the sun.
Hope remains, however, that North Korea may yet retreat from its planned test. And much of this hope is pinned on China, North Korea’s closest ally and No. 1 trading partner, which the world expects to exert all influence and ascendancy over the renegade country to dissuade it from proceeding with the test. After all, a nuclear-armed and capricious North Korea will be a direct threat, being “a stone’s throw away” or just across the border, with a weapon that could be unleashed like an arrow at the very heart of China in the blink of an eye. And it will be a constant threat to peace and stability in Northeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific, indeed another grim specter to haunt the entire human race.
The Philippines would be ill-advised to act as a passive observer in this issue. Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario is right in adding the country’s voice to the universal call for North Korea to desist from proceeding with its planned rocket launch. No country in the world can afford to play blind, deaf and dumb to this gathering global crisis.