> North Korea previously conducted missile test firings in May 1993, when it fired four missiles into the Sea of Japan. Those launchings sent Japan into a panic and prompted the Government to consider cooperation on a regional missile defense system. Such a system is still years away.
It's interesting how long a missile defense system has taken to arrive in South Korea...
Edit: The US also predicted today's missile event when the UN passed sanctions a few days ago:
> Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN said the sanctions were "better than nothing, but not enough to really pressure North Korea," adding that Pyongyang is likely to respond with a missile launch in the next few days. (Sept 11, 2017)
Having worked in aerospace I find it very interesting that a nation like North Korea can manage to launch such rockets with regularity. There is no way they are able to do this on their own. That much might be obvious. The real question is: Who's helping them and what's their objective?
What's their objective? Destabilizing and undermining American military hegemony in their sphere of influence and establishing themselves as Asia's sole superpower. I don't know how North Korea works into that, though. Maybe China just wants a proxy to harass the US with while having politically plausible deniability. Maybe they're hoping to step in when NK takes it too far and look like heroes, while making the US look feckless and weak.
It's relatively common on most social media sites including HN, reddit, etc. It was particularly noticeable during the coverage of China's DDoS attack on github a few years back.
No one is gonna fall for that. Especially since most of its neighbors are aware of China's belligerence, and are hostile to China (India, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia) or are skeptics of China (Australia, New Zealand)
In the 60s Russia and the US manufactured thousands with 60s technology. North Korea has access to enough ore to make good enough metals and knowledge from history of what works.
The difficult part for them is propellants. Historically they’ve used kerosene and nitric acid but the newer rockets use hydrazine compounds and dinitrogen tetroxide oxidiser, which means either they’ve advanced their chemical industry a lot or they’ve found a supplier.
Even Hamas can launch rockets with pitiful infrastructure, what makes you think a nation like North Korea that has granted itself the capability of using all productivity and resources in the land wouldn't be able to do this?
There was a great podcast on NYTimes' The Daily about new advancements in the rocket engines used – their conclusion is that with Ukraine in flux, the source of Russia's missile engines (which Russia has recently stopped buying) are selling them off to North Korea, or an intermediary.
Do you listen to Arms Control Wonk? It's a podcast; they go deep, deep into the weeds of these missiles and what we know about them. In one podcast recently they talked about the cooperation between Iran and North Korea.
The impressive part is the pace. There are multiple launches a year, and constant incremental increase in capability. At this rate, they will have the ability to strike anywhere in the world in just a few years.
I wonder if anyone in Beijing has thought through the idea that someday maybe a nuclear armed NK deciding it doesn't want to play nice with them anymore.
Like, if Saddam had nukes he'd probably still be alive.
Neither is true. The DPRK isn't trying to pursue a war against its enemies in a military sense. They're trying to extort money from the world community as a price for peace.
Higher = Shorter Range while allowing for the significant burn of a longer range capability [1]
So you can test or show off something really powerful, that you don't want to actually hit anything important by shooting it straight up. That's why many of these are considered "Space Launches." Otherwise if you shoot low altitude you only get a single or possibly second stage tested.
Wild guess from the highly relevant experience of having played Kerbal Space Program: if you don't actually intend to achieve orbit (which is mostly about going sideways really fast, not up) it may be more fuel-efficient to reach your target by going relatively high, to lengthen the amount of time you spend in little/no atmosphere before coming back down. Or maybe you want to be going really fast on the way down for some reason. Or (relatedly) it's harder to shoot down a missile on that kind of trajectory than a flatter one.
Going down really fast has an excellent reason: the faster you go down, the less time a counter-missile has to intercept you, and the harder it is (speed and acceleration requirements become insane).
1) You conserve fuel by following a specfiic flight path and it has the added benefit of also getting out of the atmosphere. The ballistic trajectory that they follow is the minimum-energy trajectory. Putting this another way, you maximise payload for a given amount of fuel, and so can deliver a bigger warhead for a given rocket.
Additionally, why plough through half a sphere of air when you can get up and out? The advantage of their extreme range is that they escape the atmosphere and so don't deal with atmospheric drag the whole way.
2) Intercepting something coming down from above is far harder than intercepting something coming at you from down low, so it has that added benefit.
I'm sure there's other advantages, but they're the ones that spring to mind immediately.
I'm currently on a ship sailing through the Bering Sea and down through the north Pacific towards Hokkaido over the next week or so. I am not sure if we should be more worried about typhoon Talim or North Korea :)
I mean, I know why, except this is the just the bazillionth time that NK has "cried wolf". I just can't muster the level of panic all the headlines demand.
Quick! Somebody suggest Moar Sanctions that the Chinese will go on ignoring.
I heard an interesting psychological profile of Hitler once, and the person said he didn't actually want to win. He had horrible means, so why assume he didn't have a horrible goal(losing, consciously or subconsciously)? I think North Korea's leader has horrible means, and may have a horrible goal, some sort of suicide where he destroys his whole country via the USA.
Him thinking he can capture Guam is perhaps only possible to believe if he has really bad thinking. He has really bad ways of dealing with his people, so it's possible he is subconsciously trying to destroy himself.
He might have flaming words but he knows all too well that nuclear weapons and missiles are his only defense against the US, and esp. someone like Trump
Look at any other country that has given up its nuclear program. Khadafi, Saddam Hussein are here no more. Kim Jong-Un knows well too well that if he gave in to american demands, his regime will end.
I've heard that too, Putin was saying that at a press conference. It makes sense, since we ran those other countries rampant after they gave up.
Still, that's an excuse to keep his nuclear program, not to try and capture Guam. Capturing Guam is a misguided goal, which could hint at a further addled mind.
There is a Batman cartoon wherein the Joker is taken under the wing of a popular psychologist who goes to great lengths to explain that the Joker is not evil, rather he is merely trying to express himself under the pressure exerted upon him by society personified by an aging purist known as the Batman. On live TV he executes the good doctor with a shattered coffee cup before murdering the audience with poison gas.
It is always dangerous to use entertainment fiction as an analog to reality. Nonetheless, I cannot help but feel revulsion when a pampered, armchair sociologist tries to handwave the destructive tendencies of a poorly informed autocrat as some kind of grandiose, suicidal tendency.
The latest round of intercontinental saber rattling is not a product of rampant psychopathy; it is iteration of a proven methodology.
It's pure survival for himself and his dynasty, just like it was for King Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung.
If the regime collapses and Kim brought to justice, he'll be executed along with any family members and anyone involved in the horrors the North Korean people have had to face.
He's using an entire country as a bargaining chip to ensure he remains in power, safe and protected from outside interference.
Nuclear MAD doesn't work when leaders really are mad.
I'm not sure KJU is mad in the Hitler sense, but he's the narcissistic scion of a narcissistic pseudo-monarchy, and it may be unwise to expect rational foresight.
> North Korea Fires Missile Over Japanese Territory (SEPT. 1, 1998)
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/01/world/north-korea-fires-mi...
Which also contained this blurb:
> North Korea previously conducted missile test firings in May 1993, when it fired four missiles into the Sea of Japan. Those launchings sent Japan into a panic and prompted the Government to consider cooperation on a regional missile defense system. Such a system is still years away.
It's interesting how long a missile defense system has taken to arrive in South Korea...
Edit: The US also predicted today's missile event when the UN passed sanctions a few days ago:
> Bill Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN said the sanctions were "better than nothing, but not enough to really pressure North Korea," adding that Pyongyang is likely to respond with a missile launch in the next few days. (Sept 11, 2017)