
North Korea Missile Appears to Have Flown Over Japan, Abe Says - schintan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/north-korea-fires-missile-yonhap-reports
======
smaili
Does anyone ever wonder if these missiles run their path due to
glitches/malfunctions in the code rather than what's instructed by the
operator? It's just hard for me to fathom why a country would _intentionally_
fire missiles at other countries, especially when it's a battle they cannot
win.

~~~
colanderman
North Korea is absolutely at, or very near, a strategic position wherein
attacking better-armed foes is a winning strategy. Consider:

1\. NK's economy is in shambles. The regime has almost nothing to lose.

2\. NK's regime does not care about human life (as evidenced by abuses against
the people of NK). They would have no qualms about killing many many foreign
civilians.

3\. NK's populace/military would either not know about such an attack, would
be convinced by state media that it was a justified attack on a military
target, or would not be in a position to do anything about it.

4\. Every country which NK _has_ threatened (US, Japan, SK) is in all ways the
opposite of the above: economically robust; government/military respecting of
human life (of course there is room for debate there); populace respecting of
human life and wary of war.

That means that any attack from NK against one of the above countries plays
out as follows:

1\. NK obliterates a population center. It has now demonstrated a capable
threat.

2\. NK makes demands (food, money, land, autonomy, whatever).

3\. Victim country (say Japan) can either retaliate with precision strikes,
retaliate in kind, retaliate with massive force, do nothing, or give in to
demands.

3.a. Retaliating with precision strikes takes too long. NK launches another
devastating attack. It is clearly not an option for the victim to lose another
population center.

3.b. Retaliating in kind would be unacceptable to the government and populace
of the victim country and the world at large. And if it were, it would not be
worth the chance of a second attack from NK.

3.c. Retaliating with massive force (the "Trump" option) is absolutely not an
option. Like the previous response, it would be completely unacceptable to the
rest of the world, but most importantly, you would now be in a war with China
who has to contend with a flood of refugees from a destroyed country.

3.d. Do nothing. Another city gets destroyed. NK is desperate, and there are
lots of cities it can blow up until it gets its way.

3.e. Give in to demands. This is the only outcome that is all-around tenable.
NK is happy, and further massive loss of human life is prevented.

NK is in an even _better_ position if they can win their demands by merely
demonstrating _capability_ of destroying – or accidentally destroying – a city
(e.g. by launching missiles _over_ Japan), because they can repeat that trick
more frequently than by _actually_ destroying a city.

~~~
maxerickson
I've wondered if the best strategy might be to flood them with material goods.
Just an absolute torrent of everything they could want.

Or maybe do insane things like put really nice billion dollar ships offshore
and blow them up once a month.

Somehow demonstrate the asymmetry to a larger portion of the population.

~~~
hintss
and then they tell their population that you're giving them the material goods
because they defeated you in a war, and that they blew up that ship.

~~~
maxerickson
Not one ship, dozens of them, month after month after month.

But that was mostly a silly suggestion, the idea is to try to think of a way
to make the idea that things are better elsewhere more available to the
broader population. No idea if it is possible, but I think trying to do that
might be more humane than ever harsher economic sanctions.

------
Hasknewbie
For context, it should be noted that it's not the first time a NK test missile
crosses over into a neighbour's air space, see [1] for recent example,
although I'm pretty sure they did the same thing a few year ago.

So basically: nothing new.

[1] [http://safeairspace.net/information/north-
korea/](http://safeairspace.net/information/north-korea/)

~~~
URSpider94
While they often violate other countries' air space, this is the first time he
has flown a missile OVER a Japanese land mass. This is a major big deal to the
Japanese. Source: I'm in Tokyo right now... :/

~~~
napsterbr
Were you (or citizens in general) actually able to see the missile crossing
the sky?

~~~
URSpider94
The missile crossed over Hokkaido, which is the northern large island in the
archipelago. I doubt it would have been visible from Tokyo. I don't know
whether anyone saw it up there.

------
rilmayer
In Japan, I think that I couldn’t do anything if missile landed. Because J
Alert, alerting system that announce emergency for Japannese people, alerted
missile fired at 6:02 am and informed passing throgh hokkaido at 6:06 am. We
cannot do anything while missile passed through japnese sky.

------
mrtksn
Sometimes I wonder, how it is to be an engineer working for a crazy dictator.

I would guess you get some special privileges, you are not tied to any
regulations but your constrains are budget and supply chain efficiency.

The dictator does not need to explain things to the public, does not need to
obey the law so you can have a crazy idea about that machine you want to build
and if you can convince one guy, you have it all.

~~~
cabaalis
I don't know any specific examples, but I wonder how much of our knowledge
today came from people working under these conditions. It's terrible, but do
we now retain knowledge learned from people experimenting on humans under
Hitler, for example? How many warfare techniques were developed by kings or
other absolute leaders asking engineers to build novel weapons with no
constraints?

~~~
mikestew
Thanks to the Nazis, I know my maximum time to survive in freezing water is
about eight minutes. That can't be the only example.

~~~
nradov
That's really not correct.

[http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/](http://gcaptain.com/cold_water/)

~~~
eru
Interesting find!

I also did some recreational ice swimming (and read much more about other
maniacs who do it regularly): so I can totally see how hypothermia does not
kick in as quickly as people think it would.

------
verelo
So I'm a little confused, what's all this talk about anti-missile systems? Are
they even real or just seriously over-stated? If you look at where Hokkaido is
I feel it's hard to believe that some protection system wouldn't activate when
the missile lands on the eastern side if the island.

~~~
Hasknewbie
The anti-missile system being talked about recently is in South Korea, not
Japan.

~~~
ekianjo
No, Japan is supposed to have some too.

~~~
zaphirplane
Wonder why the did intercept, that has to have been a lively debate

------
__sha3d2
So, is Missile Defense vaporware? How come these systems are always part of
the conversation until there are real missiles to stop? Am I just missing all
of the successful takedowns?

~~~
CodeWriter23
The Patriot Anti-Missile system had plenty of successes and a few failures
broadcast on live TV during the first Gulf War.

But I think the idea is to only use them when the launched missile is on a
trajectory to hit a target you want to defend. First, it costs money. Second,
each time a defensive missile is deployed, there is inherently some
information leakage about the defensive capability. So if you're going to make
such a disclosure, you want it to count.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Patriots in the Gulf War were pretty good at shooting down incoming Scud
missiles - but Scuds are fairly slow short-range missiles, with a range of
~200-700km depending on the version.

This was probably a Hwasong-12, with a range of ~5,000km. It would be a much
more difficult target to hit, especially at maximum altitude or on terminal
approach (where it would be traveling very fast indeed).

Patriots have gotten much better since the first Gulf War and we have other
systems designed to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it's still a very hard
problem that we've not completely solved. It seems likely that the reason
we've not shot down a North Korean test missile is that there is a high enough
possibility of failure that it wouldn't be worth the risk.

~~~
CodeWriter23
I'm sure there is great optimization possible from 80's tech, which out of
computational necessity, communicated by satellite to mainframes at NORAD. And
if you think about it, a defensive missile doesn't have to outrun an offensive
one. It just needs to be in the right place at the right time. It doesn't have
to have pinpoint accuracy either; errors can be corrected by sizing and/or
clustering the defensive payload.

------
dev_throw
It seems like the Kim regime is backed into a corner where only the capability
to launch nuclear weapons will ensure that they aren't wiped off the face of
the planet.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It's easy to mock the DPRK, but its actions are perfectly rational. The
leadership has realised that nukes are necessary to remain in power.

~~~
existencebox
That seems to be canonically false, however, due to the fact that they had the
metaphorical "gun to S. Korea's Head" long before they had nukes, and despite
bragging for years about their intentions the international community was
still very limited in their actions.

Nukes seem peripheral to the core capability of just being able to do enough
damage before you can be stopped that anyone is afraid to engage you. (to
provide an example; if you watch the news running up to the iraq invasion,
many outlets were _very convinced_ we'd see WMD used against us, but that
didn't seem to be the primary or even tangential cause for hesitation at the
time.)

~~~
kbenson
It's not just about how much damage you can cause, it's about who you can
cause it to. At some point, if the only damage N.K. can do is to S.K., a third
party might choose to take action against N.K. before they have the capability
to hurt that third party.

Put in real terms, if the U.S. strongly believed that N.K. would be able to
deliver a nuclear warhead to the pacific northwest accurately in the next
year, a preemptive strike by the U.S. that causes massive casualties in S.K.
in retaliation might go from unthinkable to "a hard decision that needs
careful thought." to those in power in the U.S.

~~~
MBCook
No, they could nuke China. Even if they don't they could send hundreds of
thousands or millions of refugees poring over the border.

There is a reason China plays ball with them.

~~~
kbenson
I'm confused what this has to do with what I wrote? I'm not sure I'm
interpreting it correctly, as I can't seem to see how it applies to my own
point. I was addressing "That seems to be canonically false, however, due to
the fact that they had the metaphorical "gun to S. Korea's Head" long before
they had nukes".

I'm just noting that "ability to cause a lot of damage to ally" and "ability
to cause a lot of damage to _you_ " can have different weights in the decision
process.

~~~
MBCook
I see your point. I read your comment as 'worst case they can only attack S.
Korea' but re-reading it I clearly missed the point.

> I'm just noting that "ability to cause a lot of damage to ally" and "ability
> to cause a lot of damage to you" can have different weights in the decision
> process.

Definitely true. But at this point with so much made in China, Korea, and
Japan I'd expect that any big political disruption in East Asia would end up
being extremely disruptive to the US even though we wouldn't (in this example)
be under attack ourselves.

------
coolswan
Japan PM needs a strong show of support and response to North Korea from Trump
and the US.

------
patates
Don't most countries (especially the neighbors to those with violent
tendencies) have automatic defenses against missiles? If Japan has such a
system, did it fail to trigger? I just find it very weird that a missile would
be able to pass across a country uninterrupted.

~~~
freehunter
Shooting down a missile with another missile is very difficult, especially if
it's an ICBM moving at full speed.

Couple that with the fact that Hokkaido is as far north as you can get in
Japan (as far from Tokyo and other major population centers further south, so
there may not be missile defense systems there. Israel's Iron Dome only has a
range of 70km, so I doubt, even if Japan had better technology, that they'd
have one of these set up everywhere across the islands.

Being that Hokkaido is so far north, if you look on a map it's very very close
to Russia. Not knowing the exact trajectory that it took, it's plausible that
it went over Japanese airspace but was obviously not on a trajectory to impact
the island itself. The article doesn't say where it was headed, just that it
was in Japanese "airspace", and that it landed off the coast.

So plenty of reasons why it wasn't shot down. I'll add one more: the last
thing you want to do is try to shoot down a test rocket and fail. Because if
you fail on the test, the enemy will be more willing to believe you'd fail on
the real thing, too.

~~~
kuschku
NHK just reported on TV it passed directly over Hokkaido, but landed 1200km
straight east of Hokkaido in the sea.

------
anonu
Maybe North Korea shorted the market yesterday? Missile over Japan... Market
down now. Coincidence? This might be an easier way to get money than asking
for aid

------
M4v3R
> Several missiles were fired by North Korea, NHK cites Japan’s government as
> saying.

> Missile likely landed off eastern coast of Hokkaido, NHK says.

Thank goodness.

------
rodrigocoelho
Someone posted this on Twitter: "Alarm from JP Gov. 'A missile was fired from
North Korea. Please evacuate to a sturdy building or basement.'"

[https://twitter.com/Chihokomoriya/status/902276766705664000](https://twitter.com/Chihokomoriya/status/902276766705664000)

------
Shivetya
the danger in this world has always been the day irrational leaders of insular
states gain the ability to affect any other nation at will.

the issue seems to be, no one wants to be the one that is preemptive in fear
of being blamed for setting the whole thing off.

long term is, how does the world protect itself from such as this? is there
any true protection possible at this time. Just as the USSR and the USA had
too much to lose during the Cold War the US and China, if not Russia, in the
mix, all have too much to lose, but smaller states or failing states are a
danger. Pretty sure we can list out states of increasing risk. Can any of them
be permanent bought off or that a stupid fantasy?

~~~
sudoscript
Can someone explain why it's so hard to build a missile shield around the US?
We've been at it for decades and it's still not reliable. Meanwhile, Israel
has the Iron Dome. I know we're a lot bigger, but I feel like this should
still be possible, yes?

~~~
burkaman
We have one, but intercepting long range missiles is very hard.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-
Based_Midcourse_Defense](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground-
Based_Midcourse_Defense)

There are also lots of political issues around weaponizing space and deploying
interceptors where we would need them. The US had to withdraw from a treaty
with Russia in order to build the current system:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Ballistic_Missile_Treaty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
Ballistic_Missile_Treaty)

------
jjallen
Shouldn't the title be _OVER_ Japan since it is reported to have gone over
Japan?

------
archagon
I don't get it. Why would North Korea do something this provocative? Surely
they realize that the US president is unstable and would be more than capable
of lobbing a missile their way out of anger and/or for ratings?

~~~
spuz
Because they don't believe he is that stupid. After all they did not harm
anyone in this "test". Trump cannot claim retaliation if he or an ally was not
attacked.

~~~
cmurf
Trump has said, his own words, that threats are sufficient to provoke
retaliation, not merely an attack. Whether this is sincere is still an open
question. But is insincerity useful? Because what Kim is successfully doing if
there's no response is proving Trump's insincerity. And if an attack is
provoked, he's proving Trump's bad judgment. Either way, it's bad for
everyone.

------
rangibaby
I'm surprised it was not shot down. This will probably be the final nail in
the coffin for Shinzo Abe.

If you're interested, odds are the next Prime Minister will be Yuriko Koike.

------
tmh79
Does the US have a THAAD installation in South Korea? If so, is it possible
that the THAAD missiles launched and missed these? If they weren't launched,
why not?

~~~
anarazel
The US reportedly knew beforehand about the launch:
[https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/902286999855476736](https://twitter.com/nktpnd/status/902286999855476736)

But besides that, THAAD is for the terminal phase, so that'd not really work
well for something that landed ~1000km east of Hokkaido.

------
dboreham
fwiw a friend of mine worked in this field during the cold war. He told me
that the Soviets would routinely test their missiles (as did the US) by test
launching a randomly picked rocket from the fleet. The difference was the US
always launched from Vendenberg whereas the Soviets would just launch from
whatever silo the missile was in. Not so different from this scenario really.

~~~
nradov
The US and Soviets usually notified each other in advance of ballistic missile
tests in order to prevent unpleasant misunderstandings.

------
qq66
Well, when they finally blow a major city to smithereens, let nobody say that
it took them by surprise.

------
sysdyne
Has CNN started the countdown?

------
Havoc
Someone is getting bombed to hell...

~~~
KGIII
Statistically unlikely. It may not even make political sense to do so. Send Un
some Scotch, wheat, and rice - he will settle down for a nap.

~~~
Havoc
>Statistically unlikely

You forget that the US is run by someone that makes policy 140 characters at a
time and is proud to be "the most militaristic person there is".

So while I agree with your Scotch plan being better I still think they're
getting bombed to hell.

~~~
KGIII
I'm kinda old. Trump is president, not dictator. He doesn't scare me. He talks
a lot, and I don't agree with much if what he says, but he's just a public
face to a country that had been running for more than two centuries.

At this moment in time, I see bombing as being unlikely. The Norks leaders
have been batshit insane since before I was born, and I was hatched in the
50s.

~~~
cmurf
Pretty much the sole basis for considering DPRKs leaders crazy is the Kim
family's ridiculous rants. The rants use weird language, and insincere
threats.

And so now the U.S. president is modeling that behavior: Weird language (fire
and fury) and it seems designed to be insincere, and just for laughs. It
factually hasn't changed the calculus of KJU.

~~~
KGIII
At risk of offending, I don't believe Trump is modeling that behavior. I don't
think his rants are ridiculous, meaning that I believe there's a (sane?)
reason behind them.

I feel I need to stress that Trump doesn't scare me. I don't believe he is
dumb, I believe he is a fan of gamesmanship. I don't think he is insane. I
don't think he is going to cause society to collapse. He scares me exactly
none.

I also, unfortunately, need to add that I didn't vote for him and don't
particularly approve of him. I'm just not even remotely afraid of him.

I suspect you see what you want to see and draw similarities where there
aren't any to worry about. For as much as the politicians change, we keep
trudging on. Truly, you'll be alright. It's very unlikely that things will
change in a meaningful fashion. We are very much on a trend towards better,
and have been for millennia.

------
tbabb
The U.S. government is in disarray (to understate it) and is in a moment of
weakness. I am sure Pyongyang knows this and is testing the waters to see what
it can get away with. Will a meaningful, competent retaliation come?

Maybe they went this far because all the previous probings confirmed the
weakness. How much further will they go? Who else will come out of the
woodwork and start strutting around now that nobody has the will or know-how
to stop them?

~~~
spuz
This hypothesis doesn't really make sense. Why would NK want to see what it
can get away with? All they need to do is show to their enemies that they have
the capability to cause incredible loss of life and they will achieve their
goal of staying in power. They don't actually need to cause actual loss of
life to do so. Actually performing a missile strike for example in Japan is
not in their own interest because once they step over a certain line it's game
over.

~~~
cmurf
_[Kim Jong Un] has said things that are horrific. And with me he’s not getting
away with it. He got away with it for a long time, between him and his family.
He’s not getting away with it. This is a whole new ballgame. He’s not going to
be saying those things, and he’s certainly not going to be doing those
things._ \- Trump, barely two weeks ago.

The hypothesis makes a lot of sense, because merely proving Trump's
insincerity, and that nothing has actually changed policy wise, has intrinsic
value. DPRK did such a missile test in 2009, to much deserved outcry, but
there was no escalating response. But this is supposed to be a whole new
ballgame.

So is it a new ballgame? Or was that insincere?

------
dsfyu404ed
North Koreans are the build an accurate rocket like the British build a
reliable car. They were probably aiming for Seoul.

I don't feel bad making a wisecrack since there isn't a substantive story
about this on the handful of news outlets I checked.

~~~
kbenson
> I don't feel bad making a wisecrack since there isn't a substantive story
> about this on the handful of news outlets I checked.

This story ends with " _Developing..._ ", so not having a substantive story
might be more a factor of it being a very recent development rather than it
being poorly reported or not worth reporting. I'm not sure that's a good
metric by which to judge whether it's okay to joke about, at least in the
early stages.

------
lucb1e
They crossed airspace. Nowhere do I read that they were aimed at land, or any
place with people. This particular source (Bloomberg) is most sensational of
them all (comparing to nu.nl, Al Jazera and Reuters), but they all agree that
it only crossed airspace and dropped into the ocean.

I remember reports of Russia's fighter jets crossing (I think) Finland's
airspace, which were explained as "one nation testing another's response time
and alertness, common events even in peacetime". This was back when there were
more Russia-related tensions (the Ukraine annexation thing). I wouldn't be
surprised if North Korea is doing that with Japan's airspace.

Flagged for (1) picking the least clear source available (can happen by
accident) and (2) editing the title from "appears to have passed over" to
"appears to have fired towards" (that's definitely sensationalizing it).

~~~
bArray
Russian aircraft semi-regularly test British air response times.

