North Korea’s failed rocket launch could lead to a dangerous Plan B

Last Thursday may have been a bad day for you, but at least you’re not a North Korean rocket scientist.

The highly publicized and much-condemned rocket launch was another fizzle. Instead of putting a North Korean satellite into orbit, the Kim Jong Un regime appears to have done little more than drop a bunch of space junk into the Yellow Sea.

This is at least North Korea’s third disappointment. In July 2006, its first missile test was an abject failure. Even after help from the Iranians, an April 2009 test was a flop, although it did demonstrate the successful separation and ignition of three complete stages. Now, to commemorate the 100th birthday of Kim Il Sung, it can’t even duplicate a task that the Russians mastered in 1957.

One wonders why North Korea — a country that can’t feed its own people — would be pursuing a space program. The answer: This has nothing to do with the peaceful use of space; it’s all about changing the balance of military power.

Nations that have nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them to the doorstep of a potential adversary don’t get pushed around. The United States bombed Belgrade in 1999 because we didn’t like the way Serbia was treating their Kosovar-Albanian minority. We could get away with this sort of thing because the Serbs didn’t have nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. China treats many of its minorities just as badly as the Serbs treated the Kosovars — but China is well-equipped with nuclear weapons. Perhaps that’s why we don’t bomb Beijing.

This lesson is not lost on North Korea.

North Korea’s military forces, while rather large for a nation its size, are very poorly equipped. Its tanks and fighter aircraft wouldn’t have been a match for us and our South Korean allies 40 years ago. It is still using the same equipment.

The North needs to correct this imbalance and intends to do so. Nuclear weapons are its answer. No one should doubt that North Korea intends to develop nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them anywhere.

While it is reassuring that the North Koreans don’t have a viable intercontinental delivery vehicle (yet), this failure may goad them to take other aggressive actions to compensate. This may be particularly pressing for Kim Jong Un, who is a young and untested successor to Kim Jong Il, and who may feel the need to prove his mettle to the military elite that supports the Kim regime.

Even before the rocket launch, South Korean sources reported that the North is conducting excavations of the type that would indicate the impending test of a nuclear device. On Oct. 6, 2006, North Korea conducted a somewhat successful underground test of a plutonium bomb — the same type dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. This type of device is too big and heavy to put on a missile, but setting one off is still something that makes the world take notice. In 2009, the International Crisis Group reported that North Korea might possess a uranium bomb, the type that could fit into the warhead of a missile. The successful detonation of a uranium device would be an event that would overcome the shame of the failed missile test.

Finally, the North could create another incident, like its March 2010 sinking of the South Korean destroyer Cheon’an, or its November 2010 shelling of Yeonpyeong Island. While the South Koreans showed remarkable restraint after these provocations, whether they would do so again is not a given.

In 1940, U.S. intelligence assessed that Japan was unlikely to attack Pearl Harbor because its torpedoes could not operate in the harbor’s shallow depth. The Japanese solved that problem with a cheap wooden adapter. Today, there is a tendency to conclude that the North Korean nuclear threat is minimal due to a lack of delivery means. It’s fun to chuckle at the North Koreans’ missile mishaps, but it’s dangerous to assume they can’t come up with Plan B.