SEOUL, South Korea — Residents of South Korea’s capital city received a pre-breakfast jolt Wednesday morning as emergency messages warned them to prepare to evacuate the city. In southern Japan, Okinawans were advised to take cover as North Korea sought to place a suspected reconnaissance satellite into orbit.
The launch failed, but it is unclear why the incident — a relatively mild demonstration by North Korean standards — induced officials in both Japan and South Korea to press the panic buttons.
Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement it detected the liftoff from the Sohae Satellite Launch site near Tongchang-ri on North Korea’s western coast at 6:29 a.m.
However, the “Chollima” rocket, carrying what would have been Pyongyang’s first military satellite, crashed into the Yellow Sea due to the “abnormal starting of the second-stage engine,” North Korean state media admitted.
The regime of Kim Jong-un had notified Japan that it was planning a satellite launch, and North Korean officials vowed Wednesday to try again soon.
But the launch failure may also prove to be a boon for Seoul’s own rocket scientists. South Korean TV news showed footage of what appeared to be part of the rocket’s booster stages being recovered by South Korean Navy units, potentially offering an intelligence windfall on North Korean capabilities. The booster rockets that place satellites into orbit and heft ballistic missile warheads out of the earth’s atmosphere are nearly identical.
The U.S. and its allies slammed the launch attempt.
“We are aware of [North Korea’s] launch using ballistic missile technology, which is a brazen violation of multiple unanimous U.N. Security Council resolutions, raises tensions, and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region and beyond,” the U.S.Indo-Pacific Command said in a statement. “This launch involved technologies that are directly related to [North Korea’s] intercontinental ballistic missile program.”
But North Korea has tested intercontinental ballistic missiles and detonated nuclear devices without sparking the same level of panic south of the border.
Indeed, foreigners new to South Korea are often surprised by how blase locals are to North Korean threats. Though the enemy state lies just 35 miles north of central Seoul, experience suggests the national shrug is merited.
Cell phone messages telling Seoul residents to prepare to evacuate their sprawling metropolis were sent by authorities minutes after the North Korean launch. Any evacuation would be chaotic, if not cataclysmic in a metro area of 12 million people. Even on regular weekdays, traffic conditions are often horrendous.
The message was retracted shortly afterward in a separate mobile message, stating that the evacuation warning had been sent in error.
Local press reports state that officials are “investigating.”
Residents in Japan’s southern island prefecture of Okinawa were also ordered to take shelter. That warning, too, was rescinded 35 minutes later once the rocket’s flight path — which did not come near Okinawa — became clear.
Separately, sirens sounded on Baengnyeong-do, a South Korean-occupied island in the Yellow Sea close to the North Korean coast.
Reportedly, residents descended into their shelters before the all-clear sounded. Unlike Seoul, Baengnyeong was in the missile flight path.
North Korea has previously tried to put four satellites in orbit, and is believed to have succeeded with the latter two. Of the four flight paths, two flew over Japan, while the other two were targeted over the Yellow Sea.
Ri Pyong Chol, a top North Korean security official, said the regime is pursuing a space-based reconnaissance system to counter escalating security threats from South Korea and the United States. With as few as three such satellites, the North could be able to monitor the entire Korean Peninsula in near real-time, Lee Choon Geun, an honorary research fellow at South Korea’s Science and Technology Policy Institute, told the Associated Press.
In a relatively frank admission from the notoriously tight-lipped regime, North Korea’s National Aerospace Development Administration attributed the failure to “the low reliability and stability of the new-type engine system applied to [the] carrier rocket” and “the unstable character of the fuel,” the official KCNA news agency reported.
• This story is based in part on wire service reports.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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