S. Korea to halt work at joint industrial park with N. Korea

Should the Sino-U.S. tensions escalate with the U.S. seeking to strengthen missile defense on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia, China could use a “North Korea card” to turn geopolitical situations in its favor, Kim pointed out.

The park, which started operations in 2005, has provided 616 billion won ($560 million) of cash to North Korea, Hong said.

Officials in Seoul said Sunday’s launch is similar to Pyongyang’s successful launch in December 2012. The North still does not have so-called “re-entry technology”, which is necessary to bring a ballistic missile fired into space back into the atmosphere, Yonhap cited an unnamed official as saying.

A North Korean long-range rocket is launched in this file still image taken from KRT video footage.

North Korea has expanded a uranium enrichment facility and restarted a plutonium reactor that could start recovering material for nuclear weapons in weeks or months, the United States intelligence chief has said.

Some analysts said that although it was galling for China to see its communist neighbor repeatedly engage in provocations, it will not shift its erstwhile approach to North Korea and may continue to call for a resolution through dialogue.

“However, such assistance and the efforts of our government have ultimately been wrongly harnessed in the service of upgrading North Korea’s nuclear weapons and long-range missiles”.

In the immediate aftermath of the launch, the US and South Korea announced plans to start formal talks on deploying an advanced missile defence system in the South.

Seoul last August resumed them for the first time in 11 years after two of its border patrol soldiers were maimed by mines it said was planted by the North’s soldiers.

It deployed more loudspeakers – mounted on moving vehicles – along the frontier after the North’s rocket launch on Sunday, a defence ministry spokesman said.

The three-stage launch vehicle, named Kwangmyongsong, separated its boosters successfully and put an object, which the North says is an earth observation satellite, into orbit, South Korea said on Tuesday.

The US insists that the defence system is a deterrent necessitated by the North’s advancing ballistic missile programme.

“I suspect the aim of the launch was to repeat the success, which itself provides considerable engineering knowledge”, said Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The announcement of South Korea’s unilateral sanction against North Korea came as the worldwide community is discussing at the U.N. Security Council the adoption of an additional resolution against Pyongyang over the incidents.