AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
North Korea has a second long-range Taepodong-2 missile to test but there are no signs that a launch is imminent, South Korea's defense minister said Friday.
North Korea on Wednesday for the first time test-fired a Taepodong-2, which is believed to be able to hit the fringes of the United States, but quickly crashed into the Sea of Japan (East Sea).
“At the outset, two sets of Taepodong-2 were transported from a place near Pyongyang. One of them was already launched, and the other was not,” Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-Ung told Yonhap news agency.
He later told reporters that the second Taepodong-2 appeared to have been sent to North Korea's remote missile base at Musudanri in northeastern Hwadae county where the first missile was launched Wednesday.
But another long-range missile launch is not imminent because the second Taepodong-2 has not been seen at the launching site, he said.
“If its first launch is a failure, North Korea will have to find out the reason,” Yoon said.
South Korean opposition lawmaker Chung Hyung-Keun on Thursday quoted the intelligence agency as saying North Korea was repairing technical flaws that doomed the first Taepodong-2 before launching another.
US officials, speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity, discounted the possibility of an imminent second launch by the self-declared nuclear power.
“Just look at the process. You have to get it out there, you have to get it up, you have to match it, you've got to fuel it. We're looking at a minimum of days, if not weeks,” said a US defense official.
“There's no indications of preparations of a second launch,” he said.
North Korea on Thursday hailed its launches — which also included six short- or medium-range missiles — as a success and pledged to fire more, saying it was boosting its defenses in the face of US hostility.
US President George W. Bush described the communist regime in 2002 as part of an “axis of evil” with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Islamic republic of Iran.
