The missile market is not what it used to be for North Korea, with fewer buyers for a key export product and a loss in prestige when its top-end rocket fizzled after a short test flight, U.S. officials and experts said.U.S. pressure on customers appears to have cut into sales. The United Nations has called on countries to avoid supporting Pyongyang's missile programme, but the North persists because missile sales earn it hundreds of millions of dollars.
"The buyers are drying up," said Daniel Pinkston, a proliferation expert with the California-based Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS).
Mitchell Reiss, a former senior State Department official who dealt closely with North Korea and now is vice provost at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, told Reuters: "Our efforts have complicated North Korea's missile export business."