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Pyongyang Says It's Satisfied with Missile Launches
Pyongyang announced yesterday that its July 4 launches of Taep'o-dong 2 missiles were “successful.” The Americans do not believe that, but are demanding economic sanctions against North Korea any way. Experts in the United States, Japan and South Korea say that North Korea is likely to be preparing for launches. The missiles launched on July 4 flew for 40 seconds before landing in the sea in the Russian economic zone. A new launch is not likely to be made before the North Koreans determine the reason for the failure of those missiles. The North Koreans lack the technology for tracking missile flights and could not observe the behavior of their missiles in flight, which makes that task considerably more difficult.
The South Korean Yonhap news agency cited an anonymous North Korean source as saying that the special train that reclusive North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il travels in arrived at the Musudan-ri test facility just before the launch of the missiles. A South Korean analyst told Kommersant that the North's goal is to hold bilateral talks U. S., not only in hopes of convincing it to remove economic sanctions, but so that the country would be seen in a role as an equal to the superpower. That expert said that Kim Jong-il's ultimate goal is, once the U.S. is pacified, is to create a Communist Party-run capitalist state modeled on the People's Republic of China.
U.S. President George W. Bush did not interrupt his Independence Day festivities when informed of the North Korean missile launches. Joe Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the unimpressive launches proves that North Korea is a “paper tiger,” and Pentagon head Donald Rumsfeld said that he could not explain the purpose of the launches because he is “not a psychiatrist.” The U.S., Great Britain, France, Japan and a number of other countries have called for sanctions against North Korea, while Russia and China oppose them. “Sanctions are counterproductive,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. North Korean deputy permanent representative to the UN Song Ryol Han warned that his country would take “comprehensive responsive measures” if sanctions were imposed on it.
Andrey Ivanov
All the Article in Russian as of July 07, 2006
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