hankyoreh

By Yi Yong-in, Staff Writer

The U.S. government prepared for an interception in the event that North Korea's 2009 long-range missile launch directly threatened its own territory, and provided prior notification to Russia about this policy, a WikiLeaks cable revealed.

According to a cable released by WikiLeaks, the U.S. State Department sent a confidential message to the U.S. ambassador to Russia on March 30, 2009, in which it said a defensive interception would be attempted to protect U.S. citizens and territory if it were detected that the flight path of the Taepodong-2 would be immediately affecting U.S. territory. The message was sent six days before North Korean launched the missile on April 5.

The State Department expressed hopes that Moscow would not misunderstand the potential ground launch of an interception missile and instructed the ambassador to inform Russia that it would immediately notify the country of any interception missile launch over the U.S.-Russia hotline. As bases for the missile launch, the State Department named Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The U.S. was found to have prepared a message to Russia stating that any interception missile launch was entirely defensive and that additional information would be provided to Moscow as appropriate. But it viewed the prospects of the North Korean missile launch posing a direct threat to its territory as slim. In the lead up to the missile launch, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates initially said he wished to make it clear that the U.S. would be opting to prepare for an interception if necessary, only to reverse himself later and say that the U.S. had no plans for an interception.

According to another cable, former President Kim Young-sam said at a lunch meeting with then U.S. ambassador to South Korea Alexander Vershbow on April 25, 2008, that the situation at the time would have been “better” if he had allowed a U.S. bombing of the North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility in 1994.

Kim stated that then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and then-Secretary of Defense William Perry had wanted to attack, and that they would have done so if he had not intervened.

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