South Korea’s response
The South Korean National Security Council, in the same vein, noted that the North Korean launch, successful or not, “It has been a serious violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and a serious provocation that threatens peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and in the international community.”
The South Korean authorities “They will maintain a position of coordination with their partners and allies” while the possibility of additional launches from the North continue to be analyzed, according to the National Security Council in a statement.
The North Korean state agency KCNA reported that the satellite was launched on a Chollima-1 rocket, a new type of projectile, at 6:27 local time on Wednesday (21:27 GMT on Tuesday) from the Sohae space launch station (northwest of the country).
This medium indicated that after the separation of the first phase of the rocket “The second engine’s ignition was abnormal, so it lost propulsion and crashed into the West Sea” (name given to the Yellow Sea in the two Koreas).
A spokesman for the North Korean National Aerospace Development Administration (NADA) quoted by KCNA indicated that “the failures will be investigated in detail” and that “scientific and technological measures will be urgently devised to solve them and carry out a second launch as soon as possible after several partial tests”.
The North Korean launch caused the activation of anti-missile alerts at around 6:30 a.m. local time in Seoul and in the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa (southwest), where the projectile would have flown over, urging possible citizen evacuation, although this warning was later withdrawn .
Pionyang had confirmed the day before that it would launch a space rocket loaded with a military reconnaissance satellite from Sohae in the coming days, in line with its weapons modernization goals.
Seoul and Tokyo, which called emergency meetings to analyze the situation, consider that today’s launch, like other previous ones of the same type carried out by the North Korean regime, would be a covert test to test ballistic missile technology, something that they punish the UN sanctions that weigh on Pyongyang.