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Last week, we ran an analysis of North Korea’s missile program with Dan Pinkston and Clint Work. A core finding was that the pattern of testing is not as closely linked to either overt conflict with the US—which peaked in March and April 2013 — nor to events such as the Park-Xi summit as is often thought. Rather, testing may be just that: efforts to assure the performance of weapons that are increasingly central to the North Korean deterrent as well as to test new systems under development.
Out of curiosity, we decided to consider the domestic side of the equation by looking at the timing of mentions of missiles using NK News’ KCNA Watch tracking tool, a searchable database that allows you to examine key words. Below is a graph of the yearly number of mentions of the word “missile” in KCNA since 1998. The data suggests that tests of long-range satellites-cum-missiles spur an uptick of domestic mentions. Our conjecture: these upticks combines both the use of launches for domestic propaganda purposes and reporting on the efforts on the part of the international community—successfully resisted—to constrain North Korea’s program.
The 1999 and 2001 upticks came in the aftermath of the August 1998 test of the Taepodong-1, which overflew northern Japan before landing in the Pacific Ocean. The test was a shock to both the US and particularly Japan, and set in train a flurry of negotiations leading to an announced freeze of the program in September 1999 in exchange for the lifting of some sanctions. Less than a week after this agreement, North Korea issued a statement declaring that the agreement did not in any way impinge on its right to launch (see here for a chronology of this early period). At the very end of the Clinton administration in 2000, negotiations in Malaysia sought to reach an agreement on missiles but the talks ended inconclusively; nonetheless, in 2001, Kim Jong Il unilaterally extended the earlier moratorium in comments to European officials.
In July 2006, North Korea tested a Taepodong-2 missile, but it failed after about 40 seconds; no uptick there. Interestingly, the 2009 Unha test, which also failed, did not yield an uptick either despite the fact that the regime apparently claimed domestically that it had achieved orbit.
The more recent uptick in coverage begins in 2011—the year Kim Jong Il dies--and extends through 2013 before turning down just as actual tests are accelerating. The apparent reason: long-run missile tests became a legacy issue in the early Kim Jong Un era. In April 2012, North Korea again launched a “space launch vehicle”—the Kwangmyŏngsŏng-3—which was timed to mark the centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung. It failed, but on December 12, 2012, North Korea managed to get its space launch vehicle in orbit, an event that was widely celebrated in the North Korean media even as it contributed to another round of UN Security Council condemnation and the outbreak of the crisis of the spring of that year. Interestingly, however, the sharp increase in testing of artillery and shorter-range missiles—less spectacular than the success of a multistage rocket--has not gotten the same attention. There is clearly more that could be done on this question, but there is at least some evidence that the long-range missile program has domestic as well as strategic use for the regime.
