North Korea’s satellite is ‘tumbling through space’ and is pretty useless

North Korea maintains that it launched a long-range rocket from its Sohae satellite launching facility on 7 February as part of its peaceful space programme, but critics contend that it was cover for a ballistic missile test.

The Kwangmyongsong rocket successfully delivered a new satellite into orbit, some nine minutes and 29 seconds after the liftoff at 9:30 a.m. local time on Sunday, according to Seoul’s defense ministry.

Recovered debris pieces were being analyzed, South Korea said. North Korea’s recent actions have changed that, with defense officials saying in Seoul they cannot afford to ignore calls for a stronger shield against weapons of mass destruction.

North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite is tumbling in orbit rendering it useless.

South Korean officials and foreign analysts say they now believe the first stage of the rocket had a cagey new feature: It was deliberately rigged to blow up after separation Sunday, for the express goal of confounding foreign analysts. While China says that its goal is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, it doesn’t want to risk putting too much pressure on North Korea that it will bring instability to the region and possibly cause the collapse of the Pyongyang regime.

“As to whether or not it achieved North Korea’s goals, you can ask the North Koreans, but there’s nothing about this test that surprises us, and so in that sense, again, it’s consistent with what we’ve seen previously from the North Koreans”, he said. “China is not happy to constantly support North Korea but for its national security, it has no choice”.

A USA defense official told AFP the anti-missile system could be deployed within one to two weeks of a deployment order. Efforts by other countries to block such an advance were “nothing more than a puppy barking towards the moon”, he said.

The secretive nature of North Korea’s business dealings and its isolation from the world economy means that good evidence of sanctions violations is infrequent, and the evidence must then pass a rigorous, internal US government review, he said. Such is the disdain with which Pyongyang holds the rest of the worldwide community. Eight nations alongside the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation issued statements quickly opposing the launch.

The UN Security Council condemned the nuclear test and the launch, but has yet to actually punish Pyongyang.

While China firmly opposes the deployment of such anti-missile hardware so close to its borders, the move to place THAAD in South Korea underscores Washington’s frustrations with Beijing’s failure to take a tougher line with Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program.

In November, Defense Minister Gen Nakatani said that Japan was considering the deployment of THAAD to counter any potential strike from North Korea, although Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Monday that the country had no plan at the moment to introduce the system.

Proposed sanctions have not been made public, but one diplomat told Reuters that Washington was hoping to tighten global restrictions on North Korea’s banking system.

North Korea seems well aware that China is stuck in the middle, and there were suggestions that the timing of the launch on the eve of the Chinese New Year may have been a slap at Beijing.

“Sanctions are definitely not the aim”, an editorial published Sunday by Chinese state news agency Xinhua said.

However China, the North’s key ally and a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, has resisted harsh sanctions sought by the USA and South Korea even after the January 6 test of a nuclear device that Pyongyang claimed was a hydrogen bomb.