The Missile that Wasn't - U.S. media's coverage of North Korea's rocket launch - Abstract

Progressive, The, Dec, 1998 by Bill Mesler

Then they did just that. On June 16, just days after Kim's visit, North Korea admitted what everyone has known all along: It exports missile technology. Then it said it was willing to trade it all in.

"If the United States really wants to prevent our missile export, it should lift the economic embargo as early as possible and make a compensation for the losses to be caused by discontinued missile export," read a statement broadcast by Pyongyang's official mouthpiece, the Korean Broadcast Agency. "Our missile export is aimed at obtaining foreign money, which is what we need."

Asian papers cautiously read the statement as a sign the North was finally ready to bargain away its missile exports; the headline in the Bangkok Post was North Korea Offers Deal on Missiles. Though North Korea demanded compensation, it may have been only a bargaining chip. A simple easing of the embargo might have sufficed.

The State Department missed the boat on this one. It undermined the overture by issuing a statement calling the North Korean disclosure "irresponsible." And U.S. papers reported the North Korean statement as some kind of ominous threat.

The last thing in the world the White House wants is to invite charges of caving in to the world's last Stalinist state. But the Administration may have blown a chance to accept the biggest win-win deal in the history of our relations with North Korea.

Ending the embargo is a small price to pay for a safer world. The United States should take North Korea up on the offer if it's still on the table. With broad support for rapprochement in South Korea and with a leader willing to talk to the North Koreans, there has never been a better opportunity to end one of the world's most dangerous military standoffs.

And it might help if the U.S. media took time to get the story straight.

Bill Mesler is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer and former editor at the Seoul-based Korea Economic Journal.