SEOUL, Feb. 25 (Tuesday) -- North Korea fired a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan on Monday, officials said, delivering a blunt reminder of the growing nuclear crisis to U.S. and regional leaders gathered here for the inauguration of a new president today.
The anti-ship cruise missile traveled about 30 miles over seas that separate the Korean Peninsula and Japan, then fell harmlessly into the water, the officials said. By their account, it did not appear to have been a multistage missile capable of traveling long distances.
South Korean and U.S. officials sought to play down the launch. A State Department official in Washington said the missile launch was part of a military training exercise and appeared to be "a periodic event." A South Korean military official agreed.
But the timing of the launch appeared to be designed to upstage the inauguration of South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan arrived in Seoul for the ceremony today.
"This certainly is not a congratulatory message. It is part of a detailed and calculated move to escalate this crisis," said Paik Jin Hyun, a professor of international law at Seoul National University.
In his inaugural address this morning, Roh did not refer to the launch. He called North Korea's nuclear ambitions a "grave threat," but said the issue "should be resolved peacefully through dialogue."
Roh was elected on a platform of continuing the policy of engagement with North Korea pursued by the outgoing president, Kim Dae Jung. The missile test will be "a hindrance" to the new president's intentions, a top leader of his party said.
In Malaysia, a North Korean official answered with one word, "security," when asked why the North had fired the missile, the Reuters news agency reported. The official was a member of a delegation attending a Non-Aligned Movement summit.
News of the launch broke just two hours before Roh's swearing-in ceremony. According to the South Korean military, the missile originated at a site in the north of the Korean Peninsula and traveled east in the general direction of Japan.
Reaction in Japan was cautious. One analyst said the short range of the weapon was "a relief," because it did not repeat North Korea's launch in 1998 of a multistage ballistic missile that passed over Japan.
A Japanese government spokesman, Yasuo Fukuda, said the conventional missile did not appear to violate the agreement reached between North Korea and Japan in September, in which North Korea promised to maintain its moratorium on missile tests.
But North Korea experts offered mixed opinions on whether the launch violated the pledge, a vow Pyongyang made after test-firing a ballistic missile over Japan in August 1998.
"Strictly speaking, this is a violation of the missile moratorium," said Yasuhiko Yoshida, a North Korea expert at Osaka University for Economics and Law. But launch of an intercontinental missile might have brought economic sanctions or an attack on the launch site, he said. "North Korea thinks this kind of thing would be okay. They are playing their cards little by little."
Paik, the international law professor, said he believes North Korea's pledge applied only to missiles with a range of more than 180 miles, which would not include the one launched Monday. But he said "we should take this as one in a series of provocations in the past few weeks" that included intrusion of a North Korean MiG-19 fighter into South Korean airspace and a warning that North Korea might break the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
"It was very calculated, in order to attract attention in front of many important VIPs," he said.
The launch could complicate the mission of Powell, who is in South Korea on a swing through the region in an attempt to bolster support for U.S. positions on North Korea and Iraq. Powell was due to talk about the North Korean crisis today with Roh, Koizumi and the Australian foreign minister, Alexander Downer.
A senior State Department official traveling with Powell said only that "we understand it was a short-range missile."
A Bush administration official identified the missile as a Styx, an anti-ship weapon that was first introduced in the 1950s by the Soviet Union. In its longest-range form, the missile can fly about 52 miles, according to Periscope, a private military research organization.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov called the launch "not surprising," Reuters reported. "It fits in with the line of the North Korean leadership to prepare for a possible negative turn of events. I don't think it is some kind of provocation." But "it is not a coincidence because there is a crisis," said Losyukov, who was in Seoul for the inauguration.
North Korea has taken successive steps that have escalated tensions, in what many analysts call an effort to force the United States to negotiate directly with it over its nuclear programs.
North Korean officials admitted in October that the country was assembling equipment that could reprocess uranium into weapons-grade material. Since then, it also has restarted a small nuclear reactor to produce plutonium, which can be used for nuclear arms.
The United States has demanded that Pyongyang dismantle those programs before negotiating, and insists that any talks include other countries as well.
At the same time, Pyongyang has threatened to end its moratorium on missile tests. The halt, it said, was intended to create a positive atmosphere for talks with the United States. In view of the limited range of the missile launched on Monday, it was not immediately clear whether U.S. and South Korean officials would consider the launch to have violated that ban.
Pyongyang said the 1998 launch of the Taepo Dong-1 missile was intended to put a small satellite in orbit, but the military potential of the launch rattled Northeast Asia and Washington.
Staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington and special correspondents Akiko Yamamoto in Tokyo and Joohee Cho in Seoul contributed to this report.
