NORTH KOREA and OUR GOSSIPING, False Alarm or Real Threatening?
Four of us in the room were arguing about the hot news on north korea. some said it was just a false alarm, some said it was real threatening to our daily lives. i was thinking... it could be anything but something must be done to solve the problem ...
The world's most dangerous nation led by the world's craziest leader: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) said on Sunday it launched a satellite into orbit and that the satellite was circling the Earth "transmitting songs". China and the US said it had failed to enter orbit and landed (fell) somewhere in the pacific and was not transmitting songs, but rather was blowing bubbles
The DPRK (North Korea) is a nation that cannot feed itself (there are about 200,00 refugees in China) oppresses its people and is led by a sick individual who has absolute power. The world community should take very seriously this guy's efforts to combine nuclear weapons with long range missiles. It is not going to be easy to isolate North Korea more than it is already isolated, but I think something definitely has to be done.
The problem as I see it, is that the failed launch will lead some to simply dismiss North Korea as a nation that wants to be considered dangerous, but isn't. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
North Korean Missile Launch Was a Failure, Experts Say
North Korea is the last Stalinist state on earth, and the latest country to join the nuclear club. But since setting off its first atomic device in 2006, the secretive, isolated, heavily militarized and desperately poor country has slowly moved away from confrontation. On June 26, 2008, the Bush administration removed North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism after Pyongyang submitted a 60-page report on its nuclear program.
Of course, there have been North Korean thaws before. It took steps in the 1990s toward warmer relations with South Korea, before questions about its nuclear ambitions plunged it back into isolation in 2002.
More broadly, North Korea has taken a consistent anti-Washington line since its creation in 1948, denouncing both the United States and South Korea as a puppet of the U.S. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953 the North has not attacked its neighbor, but to this day keeps large concentrations of troops and artillery focused on Seoul, and has regularly engaged in provocations like kidnappings, submarine incursions and missile tests over the Sea of Japan.
The country's founder, the so-called Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, was succeeded at his death in 1994 by his son, the "Dear Leader," Kim Jong-il, an eccentric playboy invariably seen (in his few public appearances) in platform shoes and a khaki jumpsuit.
Published: April 5, 2009
North Korea failed in its highly vaunted effort to fire a satellite into orbit, military and private experts said Sunday after reviewing detailed tracking data that showed the missile and payload fell into the sea. Some said the failure undercut the North Korean campaign to come across as a fearsome adversary able to hurl deadly warheads halfway around the globe.
Defying world opinion, North Korea in recent weeks had moved steadily and fairly openly toward launching a long-range rocket that Western experts saw as a major step toward a military weapon. The launching itself of the three-stage rocket on Sunday, which the North Korean government portrayed as a success — even bragging that the supposed satellite payload was now broadcasting patriotic tunes from space — outraged Japan and South Korea, led to widespread rebuke by President Obama and other leaders, and prompted the United Nations Security Council to go into an emergency session.
But looking at the launching from a purely technical vantage point, space experts said the failure represented a blow that in all likelihood would seriously delay the missile’s debut.
“It’s got to be embarrassing,” said Geoffrey E. Forden, a missile expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I can imagine heads flying if the ‘Dear Leader’ finds out the satellite didn’t fly into orbit,” he said, referring to the name North Koreans are obliged to use when speaking of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s reclusive leader.
North Korea’s official news agency said Mr. Kim attended the launching.
Analysts dismissed the idea that the rocket firing could represent a furtive success, calling the failure consistent with past North Korean fumbles and suggesting it might reveal a significant quality control problem in one of the world’s most isolated nations.
“It’s a setback,” Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks satellites and rocket launchings, said of the North Korean launching. He added that the North Koreans must now find and fix the problem. “The missile doesn’t represent any kind of near-term threat.”
Others said North Korea’s client states, like Iran, seemed to be having more success at rocketry than North Korea. In February, Iran managed to launch a small satellite into orbit.
The United States Northern Command, based in Colorado Springs, issued a statement on Sunday that portrayed the launching as a major failure. It based its information on a maze of federal radars, spy ships and satellites that monitor global missile firings.
The command said that North Korea launched a Taepodong-2 missile at 11:30 a.m. Sunday local time, or 10:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Saturday, and that its first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, which analysts had expected as the point of splashdown in a successful launching.
However, “the remaining stages, along with the payload itself, landed in the Pacific Ocean,” the statement said. Analysts had expected the rocket’s second stage to land in the Pacific but its third stage and its ostensible satellite payload to fly into space.
The command emphasized that “no object entered orbit,” apparently a reference to both the rocket’s third stage as well as the supposed satellite.
North Korea’s public portrayal of the event as a complete success was similar in its celebratory tone to the happy note it struck in 1998 after having failed to loft a satellite into orbit.
News reports out of Japan also said the rocket’s second stage splashed down in the Pacific, hundreds of miles short of the danger zone that North Korea announced last month. Western analysts said that shortfall, if correct, probably indicated a failure of the missile’s second stage.
A general rule of engineering is that failures reveal more than successes. If so, North Korea — which has now test-fired three long-range rockets, each time unsuccessfully — is learning a lot about limitations.
“It’s not unusual to have a series of failures at the beginning of a missile program,” Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control specialist at the New America Foundation, a research group in Washington, said in an interview. “But they don’t test enough to develop confidence that they’re getting over the problems.”
Dr. Lewis added that an influential 1998 report by Donald H. Rumsfeld, before he became secretary of defense in the Bush administration, argued that the North Korean rockets might be good enough to pose a threat to the United States, even without flight testing.
“But given that both versions of the Taepodong-2 have failed now,” he said, “we have very little confidence in the reliability of the system.”
North Korea is often portrayed as technically adept when it comes to bombs and rockets. But Western analysts say that image is now in doubt amid rising questions of basic competence.
In August 1998, North Korea’s first attempt at launching a long-range rocket, the Taepodong-1, managed to scare Japan but failed to deliver a satellite to orbit. The troubles continued in July 2006 when its second test of a long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, ended in an explosion just seconds after liftoff.
Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul, South Korea
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