North Korea is assembling a long-range missile and may be able to launch it by the end of this month, according to news organization reports.
As well, Pyongyang issued a declaration that it has a right to have a space program.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the impending missile launch, which could come by the end of this month.
Such an act “would be very unhelpful” to efforts to improve relations between the United States and the insular communist regime, she said in Tokyo, during her multi-country tour of Asian nations.
She noted that North Korea already, long ago, agreed to bans on military missile and nuclear weapons development.
If the North Korean missile launch turns out to be the launch of a satellite, rather than a demonstration of military might, that would be small comfort for Japan, South Korea and the United States, since a space launch would prove Pyongyang now possesses the technology required to build intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Clinton said it is up to North Korea to live up to its prior agreements.
“The North Koreans have already agreed to dismantling [their nuclear program] in the 2007 agreement, and we expect them to fulfill the obligations that they entered into,” Clinton said.
“So our position is that when they move forward on presenting a verifiable and complete dismantling and denuclearization, we have a great openness to working with them. And it’s not only on the diplomatic front. It’s not only the peace treaty instead of the armistice, or the bilateral relations, but a willingness to help the people of North Korea, not just in a narrow way with food and fuel, but economic and energy assistance more broadly. But it does require the North Korean Government to commit to denuclearization and nonproliferation.”
The Taepo Dong-2 missile has been in development for years. It would be able to strike targets in the United States.
North Korea also has built nuclear weapons, and test fired one of them in an underground demonstration. It is unclear how far it may have come in miniaturizing the bombs to fit atop missiles.
The peninsular regime surprised the world in the 1990s by launching a missile that arced over Japan and fell into the sea, a development that Western intelligence agencies failed to predict.
The comments from Pyongyang about a space program come just weeks after Iran moved into the space age by launching a satellite.