South Korea and Japan scrambled to interpret the fallout from a North Korean rocket launch Sunday that the regime said placed a satellite into orbit – a claim contradicted by both Washington and Seoul.
National security officials met in separate meetings in Tokyo and Seoul, where anti-Pyongyang demonstrators clashed with police for the second time in three days – this time burning a missile replica and a photograph of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.
Within hours after the three-stage rocket lifted off from North Korea's Musudan-ri launch facility at 11:20 a.m., the state-run North Korean press agency trumpeted the success of the satellite called Kwangmyongsong-2.
"The carrier rocket and the satellite developed by our own wisdom and technology are the fruit of our struggle to enhance our nation's space science technology to a higher level," said the Korean Central News Agency.
Yet South Korean government officials said late today that Pyongyang's satellite was a failure.
"So far, what [we] concluded is that the first to the third [stages] fell on the sea," Lee Sang-hee, South Korea's defense minister, told an emergency session of parliament. "[We] judge that the object failed to enter orbit."
Earlier, South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said he had conducted phone discussions with his counterparts in the U.S., China and Japan about the satellite, adding that "additional assessment is needed to conclude whether it was a success or not."
The U.S. Northern Command in Colorado said on website that all the rocket's stages as well as its payload fell into the ocean. "No object entered orbit and no debris fell on Japan," the site said.
In 2006, North Korea's last test of its Taepodong-2 missile ended in failure seconds after lift-off.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, recently returned from London's G-20 economic summit, told a relieved nation that North Korea must be held accountable for its actions.
The rocket's trajectory carried it over northern Japan, placing much of the nation on a security alert. The Japanese military tracked the rocket's passage but did not attempt to interfere.
"This is an extremely provocative act and it cannot be dismissed," Aso said. "We will collaborate with the international community. This is clearly a violation of a Security Council resolution. So we will consider those factors in our response."
