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US: North Korean Missile Launch a 'Catastrophic' Failure (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: North Korea failed to launch an intermediate-range missile on Friday, multiple news outlets, citing American and South Korean military officials, are reporting. The failure, The Washington Post reports, caused the regime an embarrassing blow on the most important day of the year on the North Korean calendar. For those unaware, North Korea had planned -- and tried -- to launch a missile to mark the 104th anniversary of the birthday of the country's 'eternal president,' Kim Il Sung.ABC further reports: "It was a fiery, catastrophic attempt at a launch that was unsuccessful," Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said Friday. U.S. officials are still assessing, but it was likely a road-mobile missile, given that it was launched from a location not usually used for ballistic missile launches, on the country's east coast, he said. The UN Security Council issued a statement saying its members "strongly condemned" the North's firing of a ballistic missile, which it said constituted a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions although the launch was a failure. "We strongly condemn North Korea's missile test in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolutions, which explicitly prohibit North Korea's use of ballistic missile technology," the official said.
I have a friend that just returned from a trip to Asia. He visited both Koreas. His take, same thing with different propaganda.
South Korea has some significant things that NK doesn't, like food and electricity,
Look up one of those NASA composites of night shots of Earth from the ISS. What's that brilliantly lit island between Japan and China, you wonder? But look closer: it's really a peninsula.
Now that's cute.
Ok, allow me to clue you in on North Korea's biggest problem when it comes to ICBMs: They have nowhere to test them.
ICBMs aren't easy to do. You not only have to get them up, you also have to get them down. Actually, the getting them up part is the easy one. Getting ICBMs, or rather, their payload, back down, preferably where it should go, and let that warhead go off the way it should, that's a feat and a half. There is a good reason why old ICBMs had insane yields, culminating the the Tsar Bomba with a hundred MTon: Until not so long ago, we couldn't really make sure that they reach their goal with pinpoint accuracy. So the idea was that with bigger yield, we have more leeway if it goes astray a few 100 miles.
And that's just targeting. You also need to shield it against heat during reentry, you need to take precautions for the g forces acting on it during reentry (hint: WAY higher than anything any human could survive), and with all this every instrument in your warhead has to stay operational and accurate.
I hope we can agree that this takes lots of testing, yes? It certainly did for the US, the USSR, China, France, India... but you might notice something all those countries have in common: Either unrestricted access to the sea or lots and lots of land mass.
North Korea has neither.
And that is a big problem when testing ICBMs. Your enemy can easily watch you test and see exactly just how far you got it nailed. And, bluntly, if they have troubles with the "up" part, we can go back to bed.
Wake me when they get to the point where they could possibly start getting that "down" part right. Then we can talk about turning NKor into a glass wasteland.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Tsar Bomba was not an ICBM weapon, and was never intended to be delivered by an ICBM - it was always intended to be a bomber delivered weapon.
There's no such thing in Cuba. You don't even need a tour guide. Source: Me. I've been to Cuba twice. I'm currently trying to go before I have to return home to Maine. I'm not sure why you'd state such a thing but it's not even remotely true. Yeah, it sucks to get caught in a lie but, you know, some of us actually travel and have traveled extensively.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."