Major newspaper editorial boards react fast to North Korea’s satellite launch

By Steven T. Corneliussen

Less than a day after North Korea launched a satellite on a missile reportedly able to reach California, three national newspapers have commented in editorials.

Online, the Washington Post used the headline "Stand firm against North Korea." On paper their headline says, "North Korea's latest launch: The new leader tries old tricks." The Post's editors see domestic imperatives forcing North Korea's new ruler Kim Jong Eun to struggle to consolidate power. They find it likely that he hopes "to repeat the trick of his father and grandfather before him: luring the United States and South Korea into trying to stop his misbehavior with 'engagement,' complete with bribes of cash and food." The editors observe that "Pyongyang has a long record of promising to stop its missile tests or to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for such aid. It then pockets the reward and reneges." They doubt that North Korea will "suffer any tangible consequences for its clear breach of binding U.N. resolutions," and they urge the Obama administration to pursue antimissile defense technologies while avoiding repetition of past mistakes.

The New York Times's editorial "North Korea's latest provocation" considers North Koreans' "harsh deprivation caused by a brutal regime" and the embarrassment the incident causes for China, "which has failed to restrain North Korea's nuclear and missile programs in any significant way." The editors conclude:

There never have been easy answers on North Korea, which uses provocative behavior to try to extort better deals from the United States and its partners. The international community should enforce existing sanctions and tighten them, and keep the door open for dialogue. China clearly can influence the Kim regime to stop its provocative actions, including any new nuclear tests and missile sales to Iran. But history suggests that China's fear of North Korean instability will once again trump concerns about the North's nuclear ambitions.

The Wall Street Journal's editors express alarm under the headline "Downrange from North Korea: The nuclear threat to Japan and the U.S. will soon be real." They deplore North Korea's forcing of its citizens "to go hungry for the sake of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them against Japan and the United States." They lament the defacto free advertising that press attention contributes to North Korea's export of missile technology, and therefore also to proliferation. They predict "another round of nuclear blackmail." They worry that the "West has no way of knowing how many centrifuge facilities are hidden in caves and tunnels." They criticize China's failure to exert control. They close with a warning and an unelaborated call for serious action:

The North Korean nuclear threat to U.S. security is no longer theoretical, even if it will still take time for Pyongyang to build a warhead small enough to fit on its new missile. The only way to prevent a Korean nuclear threat to American territory is by working toward regime change, not another short-lived deal with the North.

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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.