missile flexing

Mr. Kims tactic is known as brinkmanship, a term often used to explain the politics behind the Norths rocket launch and its detention and impending indictment of Laura Ling and Euna Lee,reporters of San Francisco-based Current TV,arrested by North Korean soldiers at the border with China on March 17.

The collapse of the Communist bloc in the early 1990s left North Korea with few friends. Since then,North Korea,a dictatorship armed to the teeth but unable to feed its own people without foreign aid,has specialised in provoking the international community for survival. Whenever it failed to get concessions or there were changes of governments abroad,the North raised tensions,extracting fresh aid while never giving up its trump card,its nuclear weapons programme. That is what it did when it withdrew from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in 1993 and began stockpiling plutonium; when it held an American for three months for illegally crossing over in 1996; when it tested its first ballistic missile over Japan in 1998; when its warships clashed with the South Korean Navy in 1999 and 2002; and when it tested its first nuclear device in 2006.

North Korea recalibrated its strategy again after Lee,a conservative,came to power in Seoul a year ago. Meanwhile,Obama took office in Washington,giving Kim a reason to grab Washingtons attention anew.

Since last year,the North has called Lee a traitor and his aides pro-American flunkies and malicious confrontational maniacs. It cut off dialogue with Seoul and stalled six-nation nuclear disarmament talks. A month ago,it began assembling what Washington believes is its Taepodong-2 missile.

Then an unexpected bonanza for the Pyongyang government rolled in: Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee. Theyll be tried for hostile acts against the Communist state,a crime punishable by up to 10 years of hard labour.

The journalists considerably weakened their governments leverage against the North, said Kim Tae-woo,a North Korea expert at the Korea Institute for Defense Analysis in Seoul.

North Korea has little to lose in this game, said Kim Yong-hyun,a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. Once again,brinkmanship is working.

Washington says that the launching is a provocative test of a ballistic missile with the potential of carrying a warhead to the western coast of USA,that it violates a United Nations resolution banning the North from such tests. But an American effort to punish the North at the Security Council will bog down in haggling with China,the closest the North has to an ally,over whether the North is entitled to launch a satellite,analysts said.

Any such move by US,North Korea warns,will compel it to quit six-party talks on ending its nuclear weapons programmeWashingtons top goal in dealing with North Korea. South Korea is perpetually divided between those who want to discipline the North and those who fear this would only worsen its isolation and add to the deprivation of their relatives there. Tokyo has made the fate of a dozen Japanese kidnapped by North Korea an overriding priority in dealing with the North.

Kim,may have suffered a stroke last August. By confronting USA and Japan, he wants to enhance his credentials as he seeks to get re-elected by his rubber-stamp Parliament,next Thursday,analysts said.