North Korea: Deadly silence

Salon

July 6, 2006 | When U.S. reconnaissance satellites first discovered North Korea's long-range missiles, U.S. analysts didn't know the North Korean name, so they made one up. The Americans decided to dub the weapons "Taepodong," after the area in which they were spotted. The Koreans call the missiles "Paektusan," in honor of the peninsula's highest mountain. Paektusan has positive connotations for the North Korean regime since it's the mountain where former leader Kim Il Sung and his guerrillas based their fight against the Japanese during the 1930s. Taepodong, on the other hand, is an old, abandoned name that was used during the Japanese colonial period.

That the U.S. continues to refer to the Paektusan-2, launched earlier this week, as the Taepodong-2 may seem irrelevant, but it's analogous to sportscasters in the 1960s who insisted on calling Muhammad Ali by the name he'd rejected, Cassius Clay. Whether it's intentional needling or, more likely, a slight born of ignorance, the failure to agree on something as simple as a name is evidence of the Bush administration's continued refusal to communicate with the North Korean leadership. Following North Korea's missile tests, administration officials claimed they had no way of understanding North Korean intentions, and had no intention of trying. Read more