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 Isolated North Korea has conducted a flurry of missile launches,
in violation of U.N. resolutions, and tests of military technology
ahead of the Workers' Party congress that begins on May 6, and
Thursday's launch looks to have been hurried, according to a defense
expert in Seoul.
A South Korean defense ministry official told Reuters that the
launch at about 6:40 a.m. local time (2140 GMT Wednesday) from near
the east coast city of Wonsan appeared to have been of a Musudan
missile with a range of more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles).
It crashed within seconds, the official said.
"They are in a rush to show anything that is successful, to meet the
schedule of a political event, the party congress," said Yang Uk, a
senior research fellow at the Korea Defence and Security Forum and a
policy adviser to the South Korean navy.
 "They need to succeed but they keep failing. They didn't have enough
time to fix or technically modify the system, but just shot them
because they were in hurry," he said.
Thursday's apparent failure marks another setback for the North's
young leader Kim Jong Un. A similar missile launched on the April 15
birthday of his grandfather, the country's founder, Kim Il Sung,
exploded in what the U.S. Defense Department called a "fiery,
catastrophic" failure.
Some experts had predicted that North Korea would wait until it had
figured out what went wrong in the previous failed Musudan missile
launch before attempting another, a process that could take months
and a sign that Thursday's firing was rushed.
However, South Korea's Yonhap news agency had reported on Tuesday
that the North appeared to be preparing the second launch of a
Musudan, which theoretically has the range to reach any part of
Japan and the U.S. territory of Guam. According to South Korea, the
missile has never been successfully flight-tested.
North Korea lists South Korea, the United States and Japan as its
main enemies.
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South Korea also says the North is ready to conduct a nuclear test
at any time. It would be its fifth nuclear test.
"Signs for an imminent fifth nuclear test are being detected ahead
of North Korea's seventh Party Congress," President Park Geun-hye
said at a national security meeting on Thursday.
DID NOT FLY HIGH
The defense ministry official, who declined to be identified by
name, said South Korean and U.S. officials were analyzing the cause
of Thursday's missile crash, declining to comment on why news of the
launch was revealed several hours after it took place.
Yonhap said the fired missile was not detected by South Korean
military radar because it did not fly above a few hundred meters,
and was spotted by a U.S. satellite.
The South Korean defense ministry told Reuters it could not confirm
that report.
North Korea's missile tests are in defiance of United Nations
Security Council sanctions against the country, which were
strengthened following a January nuclear test and a space rocket
launch the following month.
On Saturday, North Korea tested a submarine-launched ballistic
missile, which traveled about 30 km (18 miles) off its east coast.
(Writing by Tony Munroe,; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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