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North Korea Tests Missile with Longest Range Yet
North Korea tested a missile Tuesday at 1:47 pm Eastern Time with a flight path that suggests it has the longest range to date.
Reports are saying that the missile test was highly lofted and landed in the Sea of Japan some 960 km (600 miles) from the launch site. They are also saying the missile reached a maximum altitude of 4,500 km. This would mean that it flew for about 54 minutes, which is consistent with reports from Japan.
If these numbers are correct, then if flown on a standard trajectory rather than this lofted trajectory, this missile would have a range of more than 13,000 km (8,100 miles). This is significantly longer than North Korea’s previous long range tests, which flew on lofted trajectories for 37 minutes (July 4) and 47 minutes (July 28). Such a missile would have more than enough range to reach Washington, DC, and in fact any part of the continental United States.
When asked for comment, President Donald Trump said “it is a situation that we will handle.”
Published in General
It’s gonna be a long, long time til they find he’s not the man he is at home. He’s a Rocket MAN!!! Rocket MAN burning up his fuse up there alone.
Oh Rocket Man. I’d call him short and fat, but I’m not that kind of guy.
Ah, so much deterrence…
Time to ring the pacific with Missile Defense systems, and prepare orders for a complete tactical bombing of North Korea, then just wait and see if we have to do it. So long as all they do is launch rockets into the sea there isn’t cause for us to move, but enough to be worried.
There may be much less than meets the eye. The UCS-linked piece continues
Given that the UCS is generally hysterical (not in the ha-ha sense), if even a UCS writer expresses skepticism there’s probably nothing there.
In other news, the US stock market had a banner day and the South Korean won is up against the euro.
Chillax.
Seizing the illegal arms trade (Jie Shun freighter, Egyptian coast) and suffocating the Norks has consequences. Better to choke them now than appease and pray later. Obama/Clinton would have given Egypt the 300 million to pay for the rocket launchers, supporting the Norks and arming anti-Semites. The Russia/Iran/Nork cabal is being disrupted too which triggers launches to get cake. Rocket man likes cake. China can shut their barking dog up or the the whole neighborhood will be nuked.
There are wars going on on so many levels we are not seeing. There are no good courses of action but there are worse ones. Business as usual isn’t going to happen and only time will tell if that was the correct action or not. Appeasement has brought us here. Now what?
Our missile defenses barely work and to “ring the Pacific” with them would be cost prohibitive.
Bombing North Korea is a horrible idea. Another war in Korea would be a disaster.
My suggestion isn’t that we bomb them, simply that we prepare to bomb them. Then wait for them to strike first. How ever hard they hit us they can’t take us out in one hit. So we make sure our counter attack is massive enough to destroy their whole civilization. They get one free shot, but then we exterminate them all. That is our compromise with them. So they better decide how many dead Americans is enough to justify all of them dying.
We’ve won this conflict if it is to happen. All that keeps us from claiming victory is fear of pain. We should resolve to endure it and know we will recover where as they will not. Once freed of our fear of the pain they might inflict we will no longer be held hostage to their whims.
You realize you’re advocating genocide, right?
Trump’s “We will take care of it.” does not comfort, for these reasons: 1) it’s disconcertingly NOT the bombast that probably lets off steam and reduces the chances that he’ll order up some type of strategically ill-considered, ineffective-yet-provocative, strike that triggers China and begins WWIII, 2) it’s an implicit declaration of a “Red Line”, which one assumes WILL be violated in future by Kim, again vitiating (a la Obama) our effectiveness in the “speak softly and carry a big stick” department, 3) it should have ALREADY been taken care of with a surgical detonation of Kim’s rocket on-ignition on the launch pad, or soon after launch, by satellite laser, missile, or some other type of Star Wars technology that Trump should have ordered deployed prior to this recent launch.
The problem is that such technology as you describe does not exist.
The U.S. should announce that it will shoot down any missiles that enter an allies’ airspace. Then let NK make the next move. If we plan to defend our allies we ought to make our intention explicit. It will make NK think twice before launching another missile over Japan. If U.S. not explicit about red line then NK could miscalculate and start a war.
Boost-phase missile defense as soon as humanly possible, whatever it takes. Demonstrate to the Iranians that we can keep any missile from getting any higher than 3 feet off the ground. Otherwise, every tin-hat dictator in the world is going to do everything possible to get a missile-mounted bomb. As things stand, a bomb is an absolute guarantee of staying in power, and thus infinitely valuable. There is nothing we can give Rocket Man that is worth more than his bombs and missiles—unless, we can knock them out at boost phase, at which point, they become worthless.
Well-said.
#6 Fred Cole
Speaking from Tokyo, I have to say that I agree with Valiuth — and I so rarely do, so that’s saying something (to me, anyway).
By definition we’re not talking about genocide here, in two senses: 1) genocide can be said to take place when the imperative and logistics for such targeted large-scale slaughter are explicitly intended to supersede arguments and plans stemming from actual military rationality — what we would have here instead is massive collateral damage (albeit with a million-plus-strong army, the threshold of uniformed enemy combatants to clear, before incurring “real” collateral-damage loss of life, is a high one); 2) the target here is the DPRK and not the combination of the DPRK and the ROK.
Re #1 above, as a Jew, I’m both sensitive to the threat of genocide and conscious of where to draw the distinction between a campaign of genocide and legitimate military strategy/action. The DPRK’s benefactor Iran, for example, is ceaselessly calling for genocide against the Jewish State, based on zero provocation and zero military logic. By contrast, what Valiuth is proposing (and presumably the Trump Administration is contemplating) is a completely conditional scenario — indeed, the Trump Administration has been at pains to make that abundantly clear.
So here’s the problem with these two things suggestions: They are not technically possible in the foreseeable future. We simply don’t have the abilities you’re describing. Missile interceptors are not a proven technology like that. And boost phase is the most technically difficult place to shoot down a missile.
The solution to the North Korea situation is not war. War would be a disaster. We’re not going to shoot our way out of this situation and we’re not going to technology our way out of this situation.
Excuse me. We are. The Wikipedia defines genocide thusly:
I hesitate to respond to suggestions like this because they border on the absurd, but these ideas are floated so frequently and so casually by people on the right that I feel the need to answer them.
In warfare, morality always takes a while to catch up to morality. In 1945, if the US had sent soldiers into a city to slaughter all the civilians inside and torch the building it would be monsterous. But strategic bombing was new enough to warfare that doing the same thing by air slipped through.
However, seven decades later, were we to do so, it would be seen as a monstrous act.
Bombing with massive civilian casualties is not a plausible policy solution. Even if ordered to do so, the US military would not carry those orders out because it would violate US an international law. But supposing that we did, it would be a disaster for the US. We would become a pariah nation.
#14 Fred Cole
The Wikipedia verbiage you provide does not in the slightest contradict the definition I offered up — indeed, it merely supplements it. Ergo, framing a possible approach as Valiuth has done for us does not translate into advocating genocide.
The remainder of the logic you propound regrettably does not conform to things like the historical record and, well, logic. See under “Sherman, William Tecumseh” and “Strategic Air Command, US” for instance.
Even in controversial cases such as the analyses, planning, and action carried out under “Bomber” Harris and Curtis LeMay during WWII’s latter phases, we’re talking about campaigns that were neither in intent nor in outcome genocidal, not even partially so (notwithstanding US/Allied desire to achieve a measure of what they deemed retribution).
I live in Tokyo, and while people here (and elsewhere in Japan) can tend towards a degree of self-pity that turns into both moral and historical overreach where the war is concerned, the overall assessment of the war’s denouement is not one of attempted genocide against the Japanese people/nation on the part of the US and Allies.
Fine, quibble with the definition if you want. But when someone talks about “destroy[ing] their whole civilization” and a war plan to “exterminate them all,” that smacks of genocide to me.
Either way, a bombing campaign with massive numbers of civilian casualties would be a disaster for the United States.
Fred, we’re at war with NK already. Right now we’re waging an economic war with sanctions. I agree with you that war would be a disaster (especially for NK). All wars are disasters. Why? Because the innocent suffer. The key is to avoid a shooting war by having a strong deterrent. The first Korean war was said to have been hastened by Acheson’s wishy-washy remarks about SK.
If Fred’s right about the state of U.S. ABM tech, then we could be heading for another negotiation and sell-out.