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Why North Korea Is Launching Another Rocket So Quickly

Even though the last one failed, North Korea sees no downside to rattling more sabres.
North Korea's April rocket, via Getty Images

North Korea has a long tradition of sabre-rattling, and that hasn't changed under Kim Jong-un. Now the country is getting ready to launch another long-range rocket. According to Pyongyang, it's to lift a satellite into orbit; according to most everyone else, North Korea is still trying to develop a proper ICBM. But the real question, considering the country's last four rockets failed spectacularly, is whether or not this one is even going to work.

North Korea's last launch came in April, and it was a huge dud. Then, the country said it was launching a survey satellite to study the nation's forests and weather patterns, a cover story that seemed pretty thin. Now, let's just be straight-up here: that April rocket wasn't even close to ready. How much development could North Korea really have done in eight months? It'd be a fair guess to say that not enough has happened to produce a successful design. But nonetheless, North Korea says its rocket will launch sometime between December 10 and 22.

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Meanwhile, the launch has met international condemnation, including (of course) South Korea and the United States. So, while cash-poor North Korea spend $40 million a year advertising Jong-un to his own people, why would the country be willing to risk either international condemnation or embarrassment with another quick launch?

The easy answer would that North Korea needs to continue stirring shit up in order to continue securing the huge amounts of aid it receives for token displays of peace. (One imagines Jong-un calling Obama to say "Hey, we have this long-range rocket that's just for satellites, but it could carry a nuke, but we promise it won't as long as you keep sending us food.")

Oopsies. But that doesn't mean the new launch doesn't have us all worried.

But with a launch so recently, you'd think the country wouldn't want to risk another dud so quickly if it's only using it as a bargaining chip. Playing coy with international relations would require a little more lead-in, a little more teasing, than simply lining up a rocket and getting it ready to fire. No, it seems that the country is actually confident that its rocket will be successful.

The U.S., on the other hand, isn't.

“They have progressively gained better technology over time,” Admiral Samuel Locklear, head of the U.S. military’s Pacific Command, told reporters at the Pentagon. “To the degree that they will be more successful than they were last time, in such a short period of time and what they’ve done to correct that, I can’t tell you how they assess that, but we’ll have to wait and see how it goes.”

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The thing is, North Korea may simply have no reason not to try to launch. The upside is changing the geopolitics of the region, even if North Korea doesn't seem so hell bent on restarting the war with South Korea as it once did. (Plus, there's the potential that the satellite actually exists. Shiny!) And the downside? Well, there isn't much of one.

The U.S. Navy has already positioned ships to be ready to monitor the launch, which proves a simple point: whether or not North Korea's rockets work, people still have to take them seriously. It's most likely not going to test fire one as an attack, because, again, those rockets are a nice bargaining chip, and they become more valuable if they've been proven to work. But even so, the mere fact that North Korea can stand up a mysterious metal tube is nearly as effective a threat, at least in political terms, as if it was proven to work. So why not test it? If it does work, great. If not, set up another one and go through the circus again.

There's another factor that might have sped up the launch: South Korea is holding presidential elections on December 19, and both candidates have made reconciliation key parts of their platforms. For South Korea, it's an economic matter. The country is the fourth-largest economy in Asia, and it may finally be feeling the limits of sharing a border with such a volatile state. To keep growing, South Korea needs proportionately more investment, and investors may be hitting the point where they no longer want to sink more money into a country that's constantly threatened by its neighbor.

While people have long thought that Kim Jong-un could be the one to bring peace, if he's made overtures, they've been extremely quiet. It's business as usual for North Korea, and if South Korea isn't going to be permanently pissed about a rocket launch–and some analysts suggest that may be the case–then Pyongyang may not see any reason not to go for it.

Then again, it's still a risky enterprise, and a successful launch opens up a whole can of worms that won't be known until the range and capabilities of the rocket are assessed. But then end sum is that, while it's surprising that North Korea is prepping a rocket so soon after the last failure, it's not totally insane. Plus there's another angle: The country has already incited an international response, as Pyongyang surely expected, so what else does it need? Maybe the whole thing is a fake. Probably not, but we'll see soon enough.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead