(South Koreans watch a TV screen showing a graphic of North Korea’s rocket launch, at a train station in Seoul, April 13, 2012. A lot of other people were watching, too. Photo Voice of America.)
I am moving kind of slow this morning- the knee is coming along, slowly, but the first moments of the day, integrating vertical and linear motion is still a challenge.
I made it safely to the breakfast table and began to soak up the versions of the North Korean rocket launch- I liked the misdirection on the actual launch time- they announced the 14th yesterday, presumably to distract the Japanese and their Aegis and PAC-3’s deployed to Okinawa.
My Air Defense Artillery associate Senior Executive Jeff says they never would have had a shot at anything, though I have to ask him if they would have and opportunity to engage the carcass falling from 400,000 feet. His contention is that both systems are actually point defense, and I will defer to someone who spent their life with rockets and interception algorithms.
The missile reached an altitude of almost a hundred miles before disintegrating into twenty objects and falling into the ocean 100 to 150 kilometers off the western coast of the ROK. Asian stocks and the South Korean currency- the won- rose on the news, which demonstrates the irrationality of the stock market.
It has been a wild couple months. The launch came just weeks after the North struck a deal with Washington that would that would provide food aid in exchange for a pledge that the DPRK would not launch any long-range rockets, or detonate any atomic devices.
This is not the first Administration that has been confounded by the North. Someone at State, according to the BBC this morning, darkly implied that since they failed at this, the Northerners would detonate a nuclear device. I sighed. They really are an amazing bunch.
I wasn’t particularly surprised that they failed again, but what happened really did astonish me. Previously, when their rockets failed to make orbital velocity (normally third stage failures to separate) they announced success and claimed that they broadcast Patriotic songs from a sputnik-sized satellite whizzing through the cosmos.
But this time there were witnesses. An announcer on North Korean television broke into what passes for daily programming (why can’t we get it on Comcast?) a scant four hours after the launch to announce that things had not worked out so well.
Maybe it is the number of foreigners who had been invited to witness the triumph of Chuche Idea science- the original Great Leader’s doctrine of self-reliance. That the hundredth anniversary of Kim Il-Song’s birth is marked with public humiliation is too delicious for words. The announcer read a short script that stated the Kwangmyongsong-3 earth observation satellite did not succeed in reaching orbit and scientific experts are investigating the cause of the failure.
It is not going to be a great day to be a rocket scientist Up North.
Spokespeople at the US Pacific Command called the rocket a Taepo Dong-2 ( more comforting quotation on previous failures to separate), and the x-band radar platform tracked the missile on a southern trajectory. The first stage had successful separation and fell into the Yellow Sea. The North American Aerospace Defense Command says the other two stages failed to continue in flight and the whole mess went into the drink shortly thereafter.
The North is now 0-4 on peaceful satellite/ominous ICBM launches, and their public admission of failure is a curious thing. Maybe it was just to public to ignore. I have to ponder whether it means anything more than a pragmatic approach to the idea that there is more external media penetrating the Hermit Kingdom. I heard that there is chatter on the DPRK cellphone networks about the Latest Baby Leader, Kim Chong-On, and that he looks pudgy and bloated, among other things.
In a nation that is starving, perhaps a belly is considered a mark of prestige- it has elsewhere in other cultures and other times. But I have my doubts.
To salvage their reputations, I guess we can stand by for a nuclear test. Of course, they could fail at that, too. I have concerns for the poor pudgy boy who now sits on the throne. Some people are probably muttering about the Kims- and the failure to separate.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com