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Bush Administration Rejects Call for Pre-Emptive Strike on North Korean Missile Site
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday dismissed a call by former Defense Secretary William Perry to destroy a North Korean Taepodong 2 missile before it could be launched, the Financial Times reported (see GSN, June 22). “At this stage, we are addressing the issue in a proper fashion,” Cheney said. “Obviously, if you’re going to launch strikes at another nation, you’d better be prepared to not just fire one shot” (Sevastopulo/Alden, Financial Times, June 23). Cheney called North Korea’s missile capabilities “fairly rudimentary” and said the Taepodong 2 is probably not able to reach U.S. territory, the Associated Press reported (Associated Press I/Yahoo!News, June 23). Charles Pritchard, a former U.S. special envoy to the North Korean nuclear talks, today called for renewed dialogue with Pyongyang. “A missile test is a step in the wrong direction, and the appropriate first response would be for the United States to re-impose the specific sanctions that were lifted in 2000 as a direct result of the missile moratorium,” Pritchard wrote in the Washington Post. “But the missile test is not a violation of anything more than our pride, ripping a gaping hole in the false logic that talking with the North Koreans somehow rewards and empowers them,” he wrote. “To the contrary, we should be opening avenues of dialogue with Pyongyang” (Charles Pritchard, Washington Post, June 23). U.S. national security adviser Stephen Hadley said yesterday that the United States could use its fledgling missile defense system defend against a North Korean missile, Agence France-Presse reported. “We have a missile defense system … that is basically a research, development, training, test kind of system” that possesses “some limited operational capability,” he said. “And the purpose, of course, of a missile defense system is to defend the territory of the United States from attack,” he said. North Korean “preparations are very far along, so you could, from a capability standpoint, have a launch,” Hadley said. “Now what they intend to do, which is what a lot of people are trying to read, of course, we don’t know. What we hope they will do is give it up and not launch,” he said. A senior U.S. official, meanwhile, warned there would be “some cost” to Pyongyang for launching a long-range missile. “If such a launch takes place, we would seek to impose some cost on North Korea,” Peter Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told the House Armed Services Committee. A U.S. defense official, meanwhile, said the United States was unlikely to attempt use of its missile defense system if a North Korean missile were headed into open ocean (Agence France-Presse I/SpaceWar.com, June 22). No “reliable information” exists regarding North Korea’s plans, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said yesterday, according to AFP. “Assuming that such a launch is planned, we do not know what it is for: to deploy a satellite or simply to launch a ballistic missile,” he said (Agence France-Presse II, June 22). However, Moscow expressed concern over the issue to North Korea’s ambassador to Russia, AP reported today. The Russian Foreign Ministry said it told Ambassador Pak Ui Chun against any move that might “complicate the search for a settlement to the Korean Peninsula’s nuclear problem” (Associated Press II/Yahoo!News, June 23). A top South Korean official warned Pyongyang today that it should not expect U.S. concessions as a result of any missile launch, AP reported. “It seems clear that even if North Korea fires a missile, the United States would not make a compromise,” said Unification Minister Lee Jong-seok (Burt Herman, Associated Press III/Fox News, June 23).
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