N. Korea leader says launch a success
Kim Jong Il voiced "'great satisfaction." Experts' view of the satellite outcome was more nuanced.
TOKYO - Kim Jong Il has expressed "great satisfaction" that North Korea succeeded Sunday in launching a satellite.
The North Korean leader's happiness, as state media explained it yesterday, was in no way diminished by a worldwide expert consensus, based on tracking data, that the satellite did not actually go into orbit, but instead plopped into the Pacific, where it apparently sank.
"It is a striking demonstration," Kim was quoted as saying, "that our scientists and technicians developed both the multistage carrier rocket and the satellite with their own wisdom and technology 100 percent and accurately put the satellite into orbit at one go."
As the satellite story suggests, state propaganda inside Kim's North Korea, instead of merely shading the truth, tends to invent an alternative universe.
When a U.N. human-rights report this year described North Korea as an "oppressive regime" that subjects ordinary people to "intolerable and interminable suffering," the official Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang said "there is no 'human rights issue' in the country, as everybody leads the most dignified and happy life."
But even if Sunday's rocket launch did not go as described by the state-controlled media, independent experts say there was indisputable and real technological success to report.
The massive first stage of the Taepodong-2 missile functioned well, propelling the upper two stages high over Japan and far out into the Pacific. This marked a major advance over the first test of the missile in 2006, which failed in less than a minute. Sunday's launch also traveled twice as far as any missile the country has launched before.
Yet a nuanced accounting of the rocket's successes and failures does not seem to suit the North Korean political calendar. The launch was timed to kick off a festive political week in Pyongyang for Kim.
A new rubber-stamp parliament is due to reappoint Kim on Thursday as chairman of the National Defense Commission, which runs the military and is the state's supreme decision-making body.
Kim, 67, is reportedly recovering from a 2008 stroke. Since January, though, he has been unusually active.
He has shaken up the top leadership in the government and the military. His government threatened South Korea and Japan with war if they dared mess with his missile launch. (They did not.) And he has made scores of campaign-style appearances at farms, factories and bases.
All these appear to be consistent with a leader who wants his people to view him as sound of mind and strong as ever.
In the months-long run-up to the rocket launch, the country's most important domestic problem - a chronic shortage of food - was not glossed over by state media. Indeed, it encouraged North Koreans to collect their own feces as fertilizer for state farms and to go to the countryside to help with crop preparation.
As many as a million people died of famine in the 1990s. Malnutrition and stunting are still widespread, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
A state-run think tank in Seoul said North Korea might have spent $300 million to $500 million to launch Sunday's missile. If the figure is correct, that could buy most of the 1 million tons of food needed annually to fill North Korea's food deficit.
