American and North Korean officials were celebrating Tuesday night when the Norkos launched a rocket that lofted a satellite into orbit, a first for the hermit kingdom.
Pyongyang was thrilled at its success after 14 years of failure.
US officials? Well, Asia hands from the Pentagon, State Department and National Security Council were at a Christmas party in DC, reports Foreign Policy magazine’s Josh Rogin — caught off guard by a launch they didn’t expect to come for weeks.
“DOD, State and the White House were just stunned by it. They were shocked,” said one attendee.
And so it goes with North Korea, an unpredictable military regime that’s charging full speed ahead in its quest for intercontinental ballistic missiles — weapons that not only would put all of Asia at risk but potentially place the US within range, too.
The three-stage rocket it launched is fundamentally similar to an ICBM — and US intelligence believes that the North will have refined its technology by 2015 and created a ballistic missile that can reach the continental US, perhaps one able to deliver a nuclear warhead.
So the administration’s top East Asia officials hurried back to their desks Tuesday to confront Pyongyang’s great leap forward with its deadly technology.
It followed four failed rocket tests, most recently in April. But North Korea is no longer a laughingstock — it has reached orbit, and a new phase in its military capability.
There are no easy answers for the US and its allies, but the Obama administration could begin by tightening the screws.
That means adding unilateral sanctions against companies that do business with this murderous regime — and closing loopholes in existing UN sanctions that have been exploited by China.
There’s little time for delay here.
True, the North is years away from possessing what experts consider a stable missile program, but Pyongyang’s instability is a weapon in itself.
Just two years ago, a northern submarine sank a South Korean destroyer — a sneak attack that killed 46 sailors and nearly launched a war.
The Kim dynasty starved 3 million of its own people in the 1990s and today shackles 200,000 in prison camps as horrid and deadly as any gulag.
Other nations might not be eager to launch attacks using untested missiles that could explode on the pad. But Pyongyang more than makes up for its deficiencies with its savage disregard for human life in the North, South and everywhere else.
The North seeks this technology desperately. It must not attain it.