North Korea is to carry out its second rocket launch of this year as its youthful leader Kim Jong-un flexes his muscles a year after his father’s death, in a move that will likely heighten diplomatic tensions and draw criticism from Washington.
North Korea’s state news agency announced the decision to launch another space satellite on Saturday, just a day after Kim met a senior delegation from China’s Communist Party in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang.
China, under new leadership, is North Korea’s only major political backer and has continually urged peace on the Korean peninsula, where the North and South remain technically at war after an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, ended the 1950-53 conflict.
Seoul’s foreign ministry said in a statement that the move was a “grave provocation”. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda had ordered ministries to be on alert for the launch.
“North Korea wants to tell China that it is an independent state by staging the rocket launch and it wants to see if the United States will drop its hostile policies,” said Chang Yong-seok, a senior researcher at the Institute for Peace Affairs at Seoul National University.
