North Korea Threatens to Down U.S. Surveillance Planes

01/04/2009 22:59

By CHOE SANG-HUN

Published: April 1, 2009

SEOUL, South Korea — Escalating its anti-foreign vitriol, North Korea threatened on Wednesday to shoot down American military planes it said were spying on the site of its impending rocket launching.

In mid-March, North Korea’s regime announced that it would launch a satellite into orbit between Saturday and next Wednesday. Since then, it has warned that any attempt to interrupt the launching will be considered an act of war.

“If the brigandish U.S. imperialists dare to infiltrate spy planes into our airspace to interfere with our peaceful satellite launch preparations, our revolutionary armed forces will mercilessly shoot them down,” the North’s state-run Korea Central Radio said.

The broadcast accused the United States of deploying RC-135 surveillance aircraft to spy on the Musudan-ri launch site near the North’s northeast coast. North Korea regularly accuses American surveillance aircraft of intruding into its airspace, a claim the United States military dismisses as propaganda. Its threats to shoot them down reflects the overall tension between the United States and North Korea over the planned rocket launching.

The United States, South Korea and Japan say that North Korea is using the launching to test its long-range missile technology, a violation of a 2006 United Nations resolution banning the country from all ballistic missile tests.

They warned that if North Korea presses ahead with it, they will seek punishment for the North at the Security Council.

As the launching date approached, a growing number of analysts in Seoul who have studied the latest satellite images of the North Korean rocket appeared to believe that the rocket may have been configured to put a satellite into orbit. The rocket appears to have a bulb-shaped tip that gives credence to the North’s claim it will carry a satellite, they said.

Whether it is a satellite or missile launching, it violates the United Nations resolution because it uses the same technology, South Korean officials said.