Satellite images show more North Korea preparations for rocket launch

South Korea’s Defense Ministry says North Korea has moved up the window of its planned long-range rocket launch to February 7-14.

China has told North Korea it does not want to see anything happen that could further raise tensions, China’s foreign minister was quoted as saying on Friday, after Pyongyang announced plans to launch a satellite soon.

A report by Washington-based 38 North, a North Korea-monitoring project, said the presence of the fuel trucks at the launch pad “likely indicated the filling of tanks within bunkers at the site rather than a rocket itself”.

The alert came less than a month after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test on January 6, which Pyongyang claimed was the successful detonation of a hydrogen bomb.

“It was a process indispensable for carrying out the economic construction and the building of nuclear force to cope with the USA ever-more undisguised hostile policy towards North Korea”, the statement released by the state-controlled North Korean KCNA news agency said. But he added that the common reaction overseas to the North’s rocket launches has been “severely inflated” and has become “a distraction from the real and serious security problems that North Korea creates”.

Many in the South either don’t know or don’t care about their rival’s declared plan to launch a rocket this month that the world sees as a banned test of a ballistic missile that could hit the United States.

The launch will surely amplify calls by the US and South Korea for more stringent trade and financial sanctions against North Korea.

South Korea’s military has tightened its missile defense readiness to detect and track a rocket from the DPRK.

The North started its development of ballistic missiles in the 1970s by reverse-engineering Soviet-made, 186-mile-range Scud Bs it acquired from Egypt, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

“An additional rocket costs a lot”, said Lee Chun-geun, a senior analyst at the Science and Technology Policy Institute and an expert on North Korea’s nuclear program.

Of course none of this means the threat of North Korea developing long-range ballistic missiles isn’t real.

They reaffirmed their refusal to accept a nuclear-armed North Korea, as well as to the “complete and verifiable” denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The US-led campaign to impose harsh new sanctions on North Korea over its latest nuclear test have faced opposition from the North’s main diplomatic protector, China.