N. Korea Fires Ballistic Missile Into Sea of Japan

North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the Sea of Japan today in an unexpected and provocative test that analysts said came even as high-level U.S. talks with North Korean diplomats in New York were reportedly making headway.

Details of the missile test were still sketchy, but analysts said the move appeared to be consistent with the North Korean regime’s longtime strategy of using the threat of its nuclear and missile programs to try to extract aid from its Asian neighbors and the United States--a policy that has been termed “militant mendicancy.”

U.S. military authorities informed the Japanese that the missile had been fired shortly after noon, and landed in the Sea of Japan, south of the Russian port of Vladivostok and roughly 240 miles offshore from Japan’s Noto Peninsula, at about 12:12 p.m. today, according to Tatsuhiko Fukui, a spokesman for the Japan Defense Agency.

A spokesman for the U.S. Forces in South Korea said he had no immediate information about the missile firing.

A spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry confirmed the launch but declined to provide details. “It is dangerous that they have performed this test without advance notice,” the spokesman said.

In a similar missile test in 1993, North Korea rattled the Japanese military establishment by firing a medium-range Rodong missile into the Sea of Japan. Japanese Self-Defense Forces reportedly failed to detect that missile until they were informed by the U.S. military.

Two analysts in Tokyo said they believed the missile fired today was probably a newer model, either a Taipodong 1, which is thought to have a range of 900 to 1,200 miles, or a Taipodong 2 that might be able to travel 6,000 miles, making it capable of hitting military bases in Alaska and the smaller, western islands of Hawaii.

News of the missile test followed an upbeat report from Seoul on Sunday that North Korea, in negotiations with the United States in New York, had said it may allow an inspection of a huge underground construction site at which U.S. intelligence sources fear that an underground nuclear facility is being built.

The report by the Yonhap news agency quoted unnamed sources in Washington and could not be immediately confirmed. It said the U.S. might also offer more food aid to hungry North Korea. The North Koreans have reportedly been demanding $500 million or more in exchange for their cooperation--a quid pro quo the United States has long rejected.

“No one has said that the North Korean threat doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s in the North Korean interest to make sure that people in the U.S. and Japan and South Korea realize that,” said Scott Snyder, a North Korea expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace, interviewed in Tokyo today. “To the extent that they’re seen as about to collapse, who’s going to give them concessions?”

“This is part of a series of bluffs,” said Satoshi Morimoto, a senior researcher with the Nomura Research Institute.

“The thing that makes this very confusing is that the negotiations in New York were actually making some progress,” Snyder said.

Earlier, the North Koreans had indicated that they were willing to negotiate on their missile development program, while at the same time trying to show that their missile program does constitute a threat, Snyder said.

“In their own way, they are trying to raise the price” of any disarmament deal, Snyder said. “The only way North Korea can raise its position is to demonstrate that it can still be a threat, at the same time that it risks stepping over the edge and creating a crisis that they can’t then control.”

North Korea’s official media have recently complained about a step-up in U.S. espionage activities directed against it. For months, its diplomats have also been charging that the U.S. is reneging on a 1994 deal under which the U.S., South Korea, Japan and other Western countries agreed to build North Korea two nuclear reactors and provide heavy fuel oil for 20 years in exchange for a promise from Pyongyang to abandon its plutonium program.

But shipments of heavy fuel oil have been delayed, and North Korea has threatened to restart the program, which some U.S. sources say produced enough plutonium for at least one nuclear weapon, unless the oil arrives promptly.