SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Wednesday morning that appeared to reach as far as the Philippines, an apparent success for the country's young and untested new leader, Kim Jong-un, and a step toward the nation's goal of mastering the technology needed to build an intercontinental ballistic missile.
South Korean and Japanese officials said the initial indications were that the first and second stages of the Galaxy-3 rocket, called the Unha-3 by the North, fell into the sea along a route the country had previously announced.
But the timing of the launching appeared to take American officials by surprise. Just an hour or two before blastoff from the Sohae Satellite Launching Station in Tongchang-ri on North Korea's western coast, near China, American officials at a holiday reception at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Washington said they thought the North Koreans had run into technical problems that could take them weeks to resolve.
North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency said that the rocket succeeded in the ostensible goal of putting an earth-observation satellite named Kwangmyongsong-3, or Shining Star-3, into orbit.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, issued a statement that its missile warning systems had detected the launch and tracked the missile as its first stage appeared to fall into the Yellow Sea and the second stage into the Philippine Sea. "Initial indications are that the missile deployed an object that appeared to achieve orbit," the statement said. "At no time was the missile or the resultant debris a threat to North America."
Although the launching was driven in part by domestic considerations, analysts said it carried far-reaching foreign relations implications, coming as leaders in Washington and Beijing — as well as those soon to be chosen in Tokyo and Seoul — try to form a new way of coping with North Korea after two decades of largely fruitless attempts to end its nuclear and missile ambitions.
For President Obama, the launching deepened the complexity of dealing with the new North Korean government, after four years in which promises of engagement, then threats of deeper sanctions, have done nothing to modify the country's behavior. A statement from the White House by Tommy Vietor, the National Security Council spokesman, called the launch a "a highly provocative act that threatens regional security, directly violates United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1718 and 1874, contravenes North Korea's international obligations, and undermines the global nonproliferation regime."
For Mr. Kim, barely a year in office, the launching was important in three respects. Its apparent success, after a test of the same rocket failed spectacularly seconds after takeoff in April, demonstrated what one American intelligence official called "a more professional operation" to diagnose and solve rocket-design problems similar to those the United States encountered in the 1960s. He built credibility with the powerful North Korean military, whose ranks he purged in recent months, replacing some top leaders with his own loyalists.
He also advertised that the country, despite its backwardness and isolation, could master a missile technology that it has previously marketed to Iran, Pakistan and others. Some American officials, who have privately warned of increased missile cooperation between Iran and North Korea over the past year, have argued that the North Korean test would benefit Iran as much as North Korea.
The North has a long way to go before it could threaten neighboring countries, and perhaps one day the West Coast of the United States, with a nuclear-armed missile. It has yet to develop a nuclear warhead small enough to fit atop its missile, experts say, and it has not tested a re-entry vehicle that can withstand the heat of the atmosphere. Nor is it clear that the country knows how to aim a missile with much accuracy
"What's important here is the symbolism, especially if the test seems reasonably successful," said Victor D. Cha, a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's not as if the U.S. can describe them anymore as a bunch of crazies who could never get anywhere with their technology. And it ends the argument that Kim Jong-un might be a young, progressive reformer who is determined to take the country in a new direction."
The missile capabilities of a country as opaque as North Korea are notoriously hard to assess. United States and South Korean officials have said that all of the North's four multiple-stage rockets previously launched have exploded in midair or failed in their stated goal of thrusting a satellite into orbit. Nonetheless, during a visit to China early in 2011, Robert M. Gates, then Mr. Obama's defense secretary, said that North Korea was within five years of being able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile.
The range of Wednesday's test would fall far short of that goal, but suggests that the North has learned much about how to launch multistage rockets.
Choe Sang-hun reported from Seoul, and David E. Sanger from Washington.
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