North Korea’s recently launched satellite has achieved stable orbit, but is not believed to have transmitted data back to Earth, US sources said of a launch that has so far failed to convince experts that Pyongyang has significantly advanced its rocket technology.
Sunday’s launch of what North Korea said was an Earth observation satellite angered the country’s neighbors and the US, which called it a missile test. It followed Pyongyang’s fourth nuclear test last month.
“It’s in a stable orbit now. They got the tumbling under control,” a US official said on Tuesday.
That is unlike the North’s previous satellite, launched in 2012, which never stabilized, the official said. However, the new satellite was not thought to be transmitting, another source added.
US President Barack Obama will address North Korea’s “provocations” when he hosts ASEAN leaders in California early next week, aides said.
The US and China are negotiating the outline of a new UN sanctions resolution that diplomats hope will be adopted this month.
The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions against the North for its nuclear tests and long-range rocket launches dating back to 2006, banning arms trade and money flow that can fund the country’s arms program.
However, a confidential UN report, seen by reporters, concluded that North Korea continues to export ballistic-missile technology to the Middle East and ship arms and materiel to Africa in violation of UN restrictions.
The report by the Security Council’s Panel of Experts on North Korea, which monitors implementation of sanctions, said there were “serious questions about the efficacy of the current United Nations sanctions regime.”
Western diplomats said that restricting North Korean access to international ports is among the measures Washington is pushing Beijing to accept.
Missile experts say the North appears to have repeated its earlier success in putting an object into space, rather than broken new ground. It used a nearly identical design to the 2012 launch and is probably years away from building a long-range nuclear missile, the experts said.
Vice Admiral James Syring, director of the US Missile Defense Agency, told reporters that North Korea’s launch was “provocative, disturbing and alarming,” but could not be equated with a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
He said North Korea had never attempted to flight test the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile it is developing.
Syring said US missile defenses would be able to defend against the new North Korean missile given efforts to improve the reliability of the US system and increase in the number of ground-based US interceptors from 30 to 44.
“I’m very confident that we’re, one, ahead of it today, and that the funded improvements will keep us ahead of ... where it may be by 2020,” the admiral said.
The North’s latest rocket was based on engines taken from its massive stockpile of mid-range missiles based on Soviet-era technology and electrical parts too rudimentary to be targeted by a global missile control regime, experts said.
“I suspect the aim of the launch was to repeat the success, which itself provides considerable engineering knowledge,” said Michael Elleman, a missile expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Separately, US National Intelligence Director James Clapper said on Tuesday that the North could begin to recover plutonium from a restarted nuclear reactor within weeks.
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