North Korea says it will soon have its own spies in the skies, able to see what its enemies are doing, just as the US has been spying on the North for decades.
Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency made that claim this week, reporting that the North has tested its first spy satellite and will have one operational by April. The KCNA report was the latest word on North Korea’s progress in developing missiles and nuclear warheads as a “defense” against its enemies, the US, Japan and South Korea.
Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, scoffed at claims that the cameras weren’t as good as advertised by the North Koreans. On Tuesday, the Pyongyang Korean Central News Agency quoted her as saying, “So-called experts were so keen on finding faults in others that they could not help but utter such meaningless words.”
Such talk is “nonsense,” Yo Jong said, while North Korea hinted it could launch a missile attack on Japan in response to Japan’s policy shift calling for retaliation against its enemies. The North threatened actual action to show “how much we are concerned and dissatisfied” with “Japan’s move to realize unjust and excessive ambitions”.
The US and South Korea have also joined in a move that would certainly evoke a torrent of rhetoric from the North. In the largest show of force in the skies over and around South Korea, US F22 stealth bombers and B52s joined South Korean F35s and F15s in what the American and South Korean commandos described as pre-planned exercises.
Last week, under the watchful eye of leader Kim Jong Un, the North tested what he called a “high-thrust solid fuel engine” designed to get missiles out of hiding and onto the launch pad before enemy satellites see them. In addition, the souped-up engine should ensure that missiles with or without nuclear missiles can be more easily guided to the target.
The liquid-powered engines that now propel North Korean rockets into space are slow to move out of their caves or tunnels, making them much easier to spot from high above. Besides, who knows exactly where the hell they’ll land and explode
The North revealed its rapid advance as a military threat to the region days after Japan announced it would double its military budget to $320 billion in five years, which it said it needed to defend against both North Korea and China.
Japan still isn’t talking about developing nuclear warheads, but it’s definitely breaking the constraint of spending more than 1 percent of its $5 trillion annual GNP on its euphemistically named “Self-Defense Forces” and possibly the famous Article 9 of its post- War “Peace Constitution”. Dictated in the American military occupation under General Douglas MacArthur, Article 9 prohibits the Japanese from sending troops overseas or from waging war at all.
To make the North’s need for its own spy satellites even more pressing, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Japan should be able to launch its own missiles in self-defense. Presumably a North Korean spy satellite, if perfected by engineers and physicists who have managed to launch a number of other satellites over the years, would let people on the ground know what the Japanese were doing.
The North embellished its announcement with images of Seoul said to have been taken by the satellite, as if to show South Koreans it had their sights set on them. Or, as Hong Min of the Korean Institute for National Unification told Yonhap News from the south, “to make fun of it, to show that they can spy on us”.
“Too crude to be used for any purpose.”
North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency reported extensively on the satellite’s test, which appears to have been launched by one of two medium-range missiles launched by the North on Sunday. They covered about 340 miles and landed well off the north east coast.
The reason for the test, KCNA said, was to evaluate the satellite’s “satellite imaging and data transmission system and ground control system.” The test is “an important success that has gone through the final gateway process for the launch of a reconnaissance satellite”.
However, North Korean masterminds still have a long way to go to perfect a satellite with the capabilities of American satellites.
The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong quoted Korea Defense Network’s Lie Il-wook as deriding the test as “too crude to be used for any purpose”. He noted that the KCNA report said the satellite could see images about 20 meters across on the ground, while US satellites could read the license plate numbers of motor vehicles.
The North Korean National Aerospace Development Administration was undeterred by such details.
In a mumbo-jumbo exercise, the English report said the test “was conducted in the mode of evaluating the processing ability and stability of data transmission equipment, while verifying the reliability of the ground control system including the photo control command and attitude control command for various types of cameras in the optimal environment.” , which simulates the space environment after the high-angle launch of a test satellite up to an altitude of 500 km.”
However, the KCNA report acknowledged that “a panchromatic camera” on board the test vehicle only had a resolution of 20 meters and missed the range of two other “multispectral cameras, video transmitters and multi-band transmitters and receivers, controllers and batteries.”
No problem. The test “confirmed the important technical indices, including the technology of camera operation in space environments, the data processing and transmission ability of communication devices, and the tracking and control accuracy of the ground control system.”
The US has claimed North Korea launched satellites earlier to test its long-range missile systems, which the North has tested twice in recent months.
Ankit Panda of the Carnegie Endowment seemed inclined to give the North credit for developing the spy satellite. NK News, a South Korean website that monitors North Korea, quoted him as saying the test revealed an “optical satellite payload with images of Seoul from a significant altitude above Earth’s atmosphere.”
South Korea officially condemned the “provocation” of launching missiles with or without satellites, which spokesman Cho Joong-hoon said violates United Nations sanctions. Yonhap quoted him as saying, “The North Korean authorities must make efforts to develop their economy and improve the human rights and quality of life of the North Korean people.”
North Korea was euphoric about the solid fuel engine test and shrugged off the tut-tutting. In a comment covering pretty much all of its advances over the past year, KCNA boasted, “This important test has provided a firm scientific and technological guarantee for the development of another novel strategic weapons system.”