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North Korea Missile Launch Fails
An anonymous reader writes "Remember the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch by the North Koreans last night? You know, the one that went over Japan and supposedly put a 'communications satellite' into orbit. Well, according to the US Northern Command and NORAD it has been a complete and utter failure, with the second stage and payload 'falling in the Pacific.'"
Your estimate is almost certainly far too pessimistic.
The USN was doing skunkworks stuff during the cold war, with purpose-outfitted subs, finding interesting bits of Soviet hardware in some crazy deep waters. I seriously doubt that they've forgotten how to do it. My money would be that they've continue to develop the capability, but even if all it's done is stagnate they've already proven very competent at finding Soviet needles in oceanic haystacks. And NORAD will have some very accurate tracking to help them start the search. Hell, I'd bet even money they've already got something out in the Pacific somewhere waiting for just such an opportunity. Or there's a lot of crewmen who just went off leave all of a sudden.
Have a read of "Blind Man's Bluff" sometime, there's some rather fascinating escapades in there.
ehintz
They don't benefit from nuking Japan. But the benefit GREATLY by being ABLE to nuke Japan.
Just like their ability to annihilate Seoul; it would be a suicide attack, but that doesn't stop it from keeping the entire civilized world at bay.
Speaking as an ex-submariner, I pretty certain you're right on target.
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can you give a link that shows Japan as a protectorate of the United States of America?
well there's the UN charter and appealing to the Security Council to take action, but more specifically there's the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Mutual_Cooperation_and_Security_between_the_United_States_and_Japan:
Under the treaty, both parties assumed an obligation to maintain and develop their capacities to resist armed attack in common and to assist each other in case of armed attack on territories under Japanese administration. It was understood, however, that Japan could not come to the defense of the United States because it was constitutionally forbidden to send armed forces overseas (Article 9).
North Korea's entire ballistic missile program has essentially based on cobbling together different variations of Soviet Scud missiles, a design which the essentials of are approaching 60 years old. The major advance for the Taepodong-2 would be the use of the R-27 first stage, which I believe actually has gimbaled main engines instead of graphite fins for thrust vectoring. If it's true that the failure occurred at second stage ignition instead of with the first stage only a few seconds after launch (as has been the case in the past) then they've overcome a major hurdle, as a gimbaled first stage is essential to get good efficiency for long ranges. The Nodong based second stage appears to be a proven design, so if the problem is just the interfacing my somewhat-educated guess is that they're 90% of the way there. Of course the second stage probably is still using fins for thrust vectoring so the CEP of the unholy combination would probably something laughable by modern standards like 10 miles, but obviously one gets the feeling that range is their big concern right now, not accuracy.
Yeah but what cayenne8 is saying is that Saddam acted like he had weapons he was hiding, and because Saddam used stalling tactics on Blix's crew time and time again, giving the illusion (if not for real)that he was cleaning up areas and moving weapons before the UN could get there to inspect. IIRC, Saddam flatly denied access to many areas in some cases (even if he rescinded later) which still bought him time. How could Blix have known if there were weapons there or not with all that going on? Forensic testing? Is that 100% foolproof? So the UN report's credibility was questioned - whether it was right or wrong, there was too much uncertainty. When cops do a drug raid on a house they don't announce their intent 2 days prior - they'd never find anything either.
I guess the big question is, how many UN inspections did they manage to pull off without prior notice being given (or tipped) to the Iraqi government, and without the ever present Iraqi "minders"? We still don't know if any weapons were smuggled to Syria, but that's still a possibility too. We may never know.
There was good reason for suspicion; Saddam had bio weapons scant years earlier, so there was definitely a precedent there - it was not just a fairy tale made up out of thin air. The guy had made and used bio weapons before, that much was solid fact. Considering Saddam's behavior and actions during the inspections, even if just a bluff, he was sending the wrong signals.
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