The North Korean Missile Test

The recent test launch by North Korea of a long-range missile that could conceivably reach westernmost parts of Alaska has revived Cold War Era images of Communist-manufactured missiles "raining down" on the United States and its allies. Since American, Japanese, and South Korean sources within their respective intelligence-gathering communities report that the missile's third stage failed to perform as designed, such dire images of a potential nuclear Pearl Harbor-style attack seem somewhat premature.

According to press reports, the failed North Korean "satellite" launch was a test of the Unha-2 multi-stage rocket, which is commonly believed to be a variant of the Taepodong-2 that has been under development since at least since the early 1990s. What the media neglects to mention, or at least downplays, is that the Taepodong-2 itself has never been successfully launched. In fact, in 2006 during its only test, the Taepodong-2 prototype exploded only 1 minute into its flight (Pinkston; Wright).

The media has also neglected to mention that both the Unha and Taepodong missile families are liquid-fueled. This fact alone indicates that the status of North Korea's missile program is relatively unsophisticated when compared to such programs in other nations (Pinkston).

As both the United States and the former Soviet Union learned during the early years of the Cold War, liquid rocket fuels are chemically unstable and will explode unexpectedly even under the best of conditions. It is also known that such fuels are very damaging to their storage containers and that, as a consequence, the early American and Soviet missiles were deployed unfueled. Since the North Korean missile seems to have required hours, if not days to be fueled prior to its launch, its capabilities as a first-strike weapon would seem to be vastly exaggerated.

Finally, as both the United States and the Soviet Union learned in the late 1950s, there is a considerable technological difference in successfully placing a 100-pound satellite into orbit and accurately delivering a 1,000-pound nuclear warhead to its intended target (Wright). In fact, although the Soviet R-4 and American Atlas ballistic missiles were used with some success in the earliest years of their respective space programs, neither missile was seriously considered to be a viable weapons system by military planners on either side of the Iron Curtain (Chang and Kornbluth).

While those given to identifying various supposed "conspiracies" allegedly afoot in all international events will undoubtedly see the media coverage of the North Korean missile test as yet more "proof" of their positions there is a much simpler, and by far more believable, explanation regarding the news media's tone in reporting this story. That explanation is sensationalism for the sake of attracting an audience.

Sensationalism is, of course, not a new trend in the American media. Such editorial policies have been in use since at least since the times of William Randolph Hearst's newspapers and their jingoism-style of reporting on events prior to and during the Spanish-American War of 1898 (West, 44-46).

Unfortunately, it remains a school of journalism that the news consumers have come to accept as the norm rather than a style of reporting that should have died an ignoble death in the previous century.

Sources

Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, 2^nd edition, (New York: New Press, 1998).

Daniel A. Pinkston, The North Korean Ballistic Missile Program, (Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, February, 2008).

Darrell M. West, The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

David Wright, "Examining North Korea's Satellite Launch Vehicle," (The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,Online Edition, March 24, 2009).