South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said South Korea opposes any military response to North Korea’s impending rocket launch. Washington’s defense chief said the US would not try to shoot it down, though Japan deployed warships armed with interceptors to deal with possible fallout of any missile test.
Meanwhile, North Korean authorities detained a South Korean worker at a border factory park for allegedly denouncing Pyongyang’s political system, further raising tensions on the divided peninsula.
The remarks on the rocket launch by Lee and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reflect attempts to be tough with Pyongyang without provoking the regime over a launch that regional powers warn would violate a UN Security Council resolution on ballistic activity, analysts said.
Japan, the US and other regional powers suspect that the expected launch between Saturday and April 8 — which Pyongyang says is a communications satellite — may be a cover for testing a long-range missile capable of reaching the western US.
South Korea and the US are taking a measured approach because they want to resume nuclear disarmament negotiations with Pyongyang — and because the US and North Korea will likely hold their first direct talks since US President Barack Obama’s inauguration after the rocket launch, analyst Kim Yong-hyun of Seoul’s Dongguk University said.
“This puts everyone in a difficult position. Taking action could provoke the North — that’s the dilemma,” said Peter Beck, an analyst who teaches Korean affairs in Seoul and Washington.
Lee, in an interview with the Financial Times published yesterday, said he was against using military means or shuttering a joint industrial complex in North Korea, a key source of hard currency for the impoverished nation, as punishment for the rocket launch.
“Taking a harder stance — I don’t think that would necessarily be helpful in achieving” Seoul’s objective of ridding the North of its nuclear weapons program, Lee told the paper.
Tensions that have heightened since Lee took office last year vowing to get tough with Pyongyang were ratcheted up further after Seoul’s Unification Ministry said yesterday that North Korean authorities had detained a worker at the joint factory complex in the city of Kaesong on the northern side of the border.
North Korea has assured Seoul it would guarantee the worker’s safety, the ministry said without providing specifics.
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