The Korea Times August 06, 2006
'UN Resolution on Pyongyang's Missile Difficult to Implement'
By Park Song-wu
The U.N. Security Council's resolution banning missile transactions with North Korea is just symbolic and will be difficult to implement, a U.S. defense expert said on Friday.
John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told Radio Free Asia (RFA) that what North Korea is currently trying to sell is not missiles but technologies that can produce weapons of mass destruction.
``This U.N. resolution is a declaratory policy,'' he said. ``This is going to be very difficult to translate into actual implementation.''
Pike chose Iran as the most likely contender in the Middle East to buy the technologies.
``Iran, particularly with the current price of oil, has got a lot of money to spend and North Korea obviously has a lot of things they would like to sell to them,'' he said.
The North's Taepodong-2 long-range ballistic missile _ one of seven missiles Pyongyang launched on July 5 _ appears to be the same model as Iran's Shahab-5 missile, the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security in Seoul said in a recent report.
As for the alleged relocation of another Taepodong-2 missile from the launch site in North Hamkyong Province, a U.S. expert on East Asian security presumed that the move was to fix technical glitches.
Intelligence sources in South Korea said Pyongyang assembled two Taepodong-2 missiles at the Musudan-ni launch site, but recently relocated the remaining one for unknown reasons.
``North Koreans were not happy about the performance of their Taepodong-2 when they launched it last month,'' Michael O'Hanlon, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, told the Washington-based RFA. ``Perhaps they are taking this missile to try to fix it.''
The missile blew up only around 40 seconds after lift-off, according to intelligence sources.
``That suggests that it could have been a very basic structural problem,'' he said. ``Design of the rocket or some of the very basic mechanics and machinery involved in the rocket could have been flawed.''
© Copyright 2006, The Korea Times
