Many thanks to Aurelia for her incisive post about the political uses of the term "missile" versus "rocket."
Of course she is right that the term missile can be used to discredit the launcher. However, what struck me watching NHK international is that when India launched a projectile last week it was also described as a "missile," which it obviously was (India said so), but that NHK seemed almost to celebrate its launch, playing upbeat background music among other things.
The announcer stated that this "ICBM," once developed and deployed, could hit Beijing or Shanghai.
Strikingly, NHK did not mention that it can almost certainly hit Japanese territory as well (while the North Korean missile tested the other day is not being developed to hit Japanese territory, and probably could not be used to target Japan). In terms of Japanese foreign policy and regional international politics none of this is surprising, but the contrast with how North Korea's launch was covered is nonetheless striking.

Ellis' interesting post referring to an Iranian satellite launch, and a US State Department claim that Iran, like North Korea, violated a UN resolution by using ballistic rocket/missile technology to put it in orbit is also striking. I am in no way an expert on Iran or the Middle East, but from my vantage point it seems that while there is wall-to-wall coverage of Iran's nuclear program, its rocket/missile/ICBM program has been all but ignored (I had barely even heard of their satellite launch before reading the post). Why is the reaction to Iran's rocket/missile program so different than the reaction to its nuclear program, and especially relative to North Korea's rocket/missile program? It doesn't seem that any country responded to the Iranian launch in the way the US, Japan, and South Korea responded to North Korea's recent launch, or its
2009 launch.

It is also striking that while Iran's nuclear weapons development program is emphasized, it seems that North Korea's nuclear program has almost been down-played. I remember when North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006, the Japanese and US governments expressed open skepticism about whether the test had actually occurred or been sucessful. Although there was less skepticism expressed after the 2009 test I still get the impression that the test was somewhat downplayed, again especially in comparison to the possiblity of Iran even gathering the means to build a nuclear weapon, much less to actually build one.

Paul Midford