Are two Koreas in space race?

While pundits speculate over North Korea’s motivation for a long-range rocket planned launch for this month, one factor has been largely overlooked: a competition with the South to become the first to put a satellite in orbit.

Security analysts point out that Pyongyang’s announcement on Dec. 1 of the launch came just two days after Seoul had planned to put a satellite into space with its Naro-1 Space Launch Vehicle, suggesting an inter-Korean space race.

Due to technical problems, Seoul’s bid to join an elite club of satellite capable nations has been pushed back and the attempt will likely happen under the next administration.

Enter North Korea, which says the launch of its three-stage Unha-3 rocket is for scientific purposes. If it succeeds, it would be seen as a dangerous advancement in its campaign for long-range nuclear weapons capabilities.

“If (the North) were successful they could beat the South Koreans, which would have big propaganda value” for the Kim Jong-un regime, said Daniel Pinkston, an analyst with the International Crisis Group.

He added the launch could in part be a reaction to Seoul’s recent announcement of new missile guidelines agreed with the United States, extending the nation’s range to 800 kilometers from the previous limit of 300 kilometers. The new limit puts all of the North in striking distance.

If carried out, the launch would be the second since the Stalinist stae’s young leader took power. After the first one in April, President Lee Myung-bak paid a symbolic visit to the nation’s weapons development agency in Daejeon to view test-launch footage of long-range cruise missiles, while the government said it had a new tactical ballistic missile to deter the North.

The North’s Korean Committee for Space Technology, says scientists have “analyzed the mistakes” made in the failed April launch and improved the precision of the rocket.

David Wright, co-director of the global security program of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a contribution to CNN that if the North was driven by political purposes rather than technical soundness, this would not bode well for the launch’s outcome.

“Rockets are highly complex systems, and South Korea’s launch failures and delays show that even programs that are not schedule-driven have trouble getting them to work properly,” he wrote.

Pinkston said the North, given its scant resources, was likely to believe that the proper adjustments had been made, though because outsiders do not know what caused the April launch to fail, it remains difficult to determine what will happen this time.

He added that Pyongyang’s guiding “songun” or military-first principle would push the regime to react to the new missile range in Seoul. The ideology sets forth military might as the only path to regime security.

Without taking songun into account, it is difficult to understand the North’s motivations, he said.

“Doing (the launch) now, contradicts the legalistic, Western, contractual institutional perspective But from the perspective of songun this makes sense. This (military advancement) is what they want, this is what they do.” <The Korea Times/Kim Young-jin>