North Korea has gone through with its test missile launch.
North Korea test-fired several missiles in the early hours of Wednesday, July 5 (Tuesday afternoon Eastern time), apparently including the Taepodong-2, the long-range missile at the heart of diplomatic tensions with the United States and its allies, according to reports by Reuters, The Associated Press, CNN and other agencies, citing sources in Japan and Washington.
The long-range missile seems to have malfunctioned less than a minute into its flight, CNN and Reuters reported, citing American officials they did not name.
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A White House spokeswoman said staff were urgently consulting on North Korea's move but had no comment yet. "We have absolutely nothing at this point," the White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, told Reuters.
How did North Korea acquire nuclear capability?.
Last June [2002], four months before the current crisis over North Korea became public, the Central Intelligence Agency delivered a comprehensive analysis of North Korea's nuclear ambitions to President Bush and his top advisers. The document, known as a National Intelligence Estimate, was classified as Top Secret S.C.I. (for "sensitive compartmented information"), and its distribution within the government was tightly restricted. The C.I.A. report made the case that North Korea had been violating international law--and agreements with South Korea and the United States--by secretly obtaining the means to produce weapons-grade uranium.
The document's most politically sensitive information, however, was about Pakistan. Since 1997, the C.I.A. said, Pakistan had been sharing sophisticated technology, warhead-design information, and weapons-testing data with the Pyongyang regime. Pakistan, one of the Bush Administration's important allies in the war against terrorism, was helping North Korea build the bomb.
The Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q Khan was the point man on North Korea's acquisition of these weapons. The United States has not been allowed to interview A.Q. Khan. Yet Bush does not want to target Khan, despite the fact that he has been the biggest proliferator of nuclear weapon technology to rogue states like Libya, Iran, and North Korea.
