North Korea has invited United Nations inspectors to return to its nuclear plants, days after the announcement of a planned rocket launch provoked international protests.
The promise to readmit officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), three years after they were expelled from North Korea, was a condition of an agreement reached last month with Washington which would bring US food aid in return for restraints on Pyongyang’s nuclear and weapons programmes.
Another condition was the suspension of missile tests, which are already banned under a UN Security Council resolution. In the eyes of foreign governments, these terms would be flouted by the rocket launch which the North’s state news agency announced on Friday will be launched in mid-April. Pyongyang, however, insists that it is nothing more than the vehicle for the launch of a civilian satellite.
“The launching of the satellite is part to our right to develop space programmes,” Ri Yong Ho, the North’s chief nuclear negotiator, said late on Monday in Beijing, where he met senior Chinese officials. “The satellite launch is one thing and the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea]-US agreement is another. In order to implement the agreement, we’ve sent a letter of invitation to the IAEA to send inspectors to our country.”
Victoria Nuland, the US State Department spokeswoman, said: “Obviously there’s benefit for any access that the IAEA can get. But it doesn’t change the fact that we would consider a satellite launch a violation not only of their UN obligations but of the commitments they made to us.”
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The rocket announcement has drawn protests and expressions of concern from South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, as well as the US and Britain. But the US has not yet said that the deal is off.
“Regarding the peaceful purpose of the satellite launching, if others are practising double standards or inappropriately interfere with our sovereign rights, we will be forced to react to it,” said Mr Ri. “But we will try our best for these things not to happen.”
North Korea’s state media announced that a rocket will be fired from a launch site in the northwest of the country in the middle of next month. According to the Korean Central News Agency, it will carry a satellite called Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite to celebrate the 100th anniversary on April 15 of the birth of North Korea’s founding President, Kim Il Sung.
Foreign governments know the rocket as the Taepodong, and a rocket of the same type has been fired three times before. In 2009 North Korea faced international condemnation and sanctions after launching a Taepodong-2 which it claimed had successfully put into orbit a communications satellite. But the US military reported that the rocket’s payload fell into the sea.
A subsequent UN Security Council resolution demanded that North Korea “not conduct any further nuclear test or any launch using ballistic missile technology”.
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Reaction to the launch was particularly strong in Japan, over whose territory the rocket flew. Naoki Tanaka, the Japanese Defence Minister, said he might order the missile to be shot down if it passed near Japanese territory.
Even if the rocket does launch a satellite, the technology can readily be adapted for military use. A long-range ballistic rocket such as the Taepodong could potentially carry an explosive warhead to the US territories of Alaska, Hawaii and Guam. North Korea is believed to have a handful of nuclear warheads, and conducted underground nuclear tests in 2006 and in 2009, six weeks after its last-long range missile launch.