North Korea completes rocket launch site revamp, says US thinktank

An upgrade of North Korea’s main rocket launch site now appears complete amid expectations in rival South Korea that a launch could take place in October, according to a US monitoring institute.

South Korean officials are predicting the North will mark the upcoming 70th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ party with a “strategic provocation” — possibly a blastoff from the west coast site of Sohae from where Pyongyang launched its first rocket into space in December 2012, drawing international condemnation.

The US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies has said commercial satellite imagery taken on 21 July showed Pyongyang had constructed a support building on the launchpad where rockets would be prepared.

It had also apparently completed a moveable structure on rails, several storeys high, that would be used to shift rockets or rocket stages to the launch tower, and a 240-metre long shelter to conceal a rail line that would prevent satellite observation while equipment was being transported to the launchpad.

The institute said there was no sign of actual launch preparations.

“Despite the fact that the facility is ready after completing a construction programme begun in 2013, we still see no sign of preparations at the Sohae facility for an October event,” said Joel Wit, a former state department official and editor of the institute’s website, 38 North.

The North’s regime leader, Kim Jong-un, has closely associated himself with the impoverished nation’s space programme, which it says is peaceful. In early May state media quoted Kim as saying the North would launch satellites into space at times and locations chosen by the ruling party.

North Korea is barred under UN security council resolutions from launching rockets as that technology can also be used for ballistic missiles.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency last week cited unnamed government sources as saying that North Korea has almost completed modifications at Sohae, including an extended launch tower, and that it would be used to fire a long-range missile bigger than the rocket launched three years ago. This would mark the 10 October anniversary of the Workers’ party.

“I’m sure we’ll have a grand celebration,” the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, Jang Il-hun, told reporters on Tuesday in response to a question about a possible missile test for the anniversary. “We are free to do whatever we want.”

The North Korean ambassador to China, Ji Jae-ryong, said in Beijing on Tuesday that his country had no interest in the kind of nuclear deal that Iran reached this month with the US and other world powers because North Korea was already a “nuclear weapons state”.