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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.
Spectacular Fireworks To Celebrate Anniversary Of Glorious Leader Kim il Sung Birthday Huge Success!
They don't actually have much in the ways of nukes or missiles. They know they would be decimated in any war, so they detonate every single nuke and launch every missile they have to ensure that people don't bother them.
I feel bad for the rocket scientists who are gonna be executed in some horrible way...
I was pretty much thinking this. Why does it matter what Li'l Kim does? Did he change his last name to Kadashian or why does anyone care?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Your "friend" visited the heavily scripted tourist areas of North Korea. It's not an accurate comparison.
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.
Unless you have an endless supply of rocket scientists this is a bad idea.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Better watch out, North Korea! If you keep this up, the UN might write you a sternly worded letter! You'll wither before the might of their disapproving frown! If you really piss them off, they might even submit a motion to consider a vote on a non-binding resolution, at a later date!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
they are capable of bombing the crap out of South Korea
As they've been for over half a century; tell me, what objectives would be fulfilled by doing this?? (Yeah, I didn't think so; nice try though.)
...and/or Japan.
What, with all their stealth bombers?! Shut the fuck up, already.
Dammit! They can't tell other countries what laws they may or may not pass! That's our job!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nobody who even remotely counts is starving in North Korea. Did you take a look at that fatso Kim lately? Yes, the peasants are starving, but who gives a shit about them?
The very last thing Kim and his cronies are going to do is upset someone who could end their comfortable rule. They know exactly if they as much as sneezed into the direction of SKor or Japan the reply would be devastating, so they keep it at pretending to be big boys. The whole show is mostly directed at their own population to show just how mighty they are and how much they have to spend on defending against the imperialists who would immediately end their Juche paradise if they didn't.
Read your 1984, it's well described therein.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
Oh come on, Hillary Clinton isn't that bad.
You are welcome on my lawn.
North Korea doesn't need an objective. They are better armed than alqueda, and their leadership goes through child like hissy fits if they are not given enough attention. Seriously go through news history. If you are paying attention nothing will get said about North Korea for months and then they do something like this.
Actually now that I think about maybe Kim is related to Kim(kardshian)
So you give them a little attention, pretend they are adults and let them screw it up. Unlike a child you can't displine a country, especially one that has a parent that forgives everything(China).
Though even China is starting to get tired of it they have to save face and so the charade goes on for another generation
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I wonder how many people will get shot for that blunder?
why should we pay attentition to the failures of the NK rocket program
Because the rocket program has far more significance than the nuclear program. All the nukes in the world don't mean a thing if you can't deliver them. NK may be trying to fuck up Japan and China (the South has kinda learned to live with this shit) so they might ease up on the sanctions and/or take them seriously as a regional power.
But NK's rockets and nukes are more posturing than tactical. To mean anything, they would have to have the capability to mass-produce these devices (turn them out like sausages, to paraphrase Kruschev back in the day), which NK will never be able to do with their economy. That leaves them with a capacity to, at worst, blow their wad one time, then sit defenseless and receive a crushing retaliation from whatever country their wayward missile fell upon (be a real thing if a missile flew by to mistake China).
OTOH, the regime needs regularly-scheduled holidays and ceremonies to keep all but its hungriest citizens busy and engaged in non-subversive activities. I offer this as an amusing, admittedly biased, but actual footage of a visit to NK and their weird cultish every-day required devotion to the founder and the great leader, particularly on their birthdays. They also need to maintain the narrative that they have the strongest army in the world, and that foreign invasion will happen at any time. Indeed, they have a million-man standing army to maintain each day from falling apart under its own weight. Thus, the dog-and-pony show of missiles and parades and nuke tests and two TV channels showing documentaries of how great their country is, until the power gets cut at nightfall.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
I have a friend that just returned from a trip to Asia. He visited both Koreas. His take, same thing with different propaganda.
My God, one Korea is a healthy liberal democracy with successful global tech and cultural exports, and the other Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship that can't feed its people, can't provide them with electricity, and is threatening and provoking it's neighbors on a regular basis both with rhetoric and military exercises.
Your friend is... okay, I'm not even sure how else to describe that sort of sheer, utter, willful ignorance. I've heard the same refrain from utterly naïve sympathizers my entire life, about how it wasn't as bad as we were led to believe, that it was just western propaganda, and so on. Every time one of those countries fell and became free, and the people living there were free to tell their story, we learned that it was, in fact, just as bad or even worse than we suspected. When will people learn?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
The Italian ice cream company?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
South Korea has some significant things that NK doesn't, like food and electricity,
And a conspicuous lack of prison labor camps with mass graves. And a lack of sinking other people's ships. And a lack of executing people who say anything even a wee bit critical of the government (and their families, too, for good measure). The South also has completely irrelevant things like uncensored communications with the outside world. Little pleasantries like that.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The Tsar Bomba was never a weapon, it was a spectacle, a device made to intimidate imagination but not to be a weapon against any enemy (except if the enemy is common sense). It could not be put onto an ICBM but also it could not be put into a normal aircraft. The Tu95 bomber used to drop it had to be modified, parts of fuselage removed and mid section fuel tanks removed. With the device weighing abo8ut 27 tons and with more than half of the fuel tanks gone the airplane could never make it from Russia to USA.
You can't handle the truth.
Wait... You think we "increasingly have such people in charge?" Nah, the world has always been like this. There have always been lunatics in charge. You might even say we have fewer in-charge lunatics now than we've ever had. Can you imagine if Caligula had had nuclear weapons?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
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."
I'm sure it's a complete coincidence that the ignorant and irrational fearmongering usually emanates from the ass of an AC...
There are already a lot of NK refugees in China and they have been going there for many years. I've spoken to one. There's an entire "state" of people who speak Korean next to Russia and NK. When 1970's China is the promised land of plenty you know that the place they came from is well and truly horrible.
Sure do. Here, have a look here:
https://www.google.com/search?...
Pick a link, any link. You do not need a guide in Cuba and I know of nothing other than military areas and government buildings/property that is restricted access. My first trip to Cuba was with a tour group. My second was on my own and I meandered about at will and never encountered anywhere that they didn't let me in - and that included a few government buildings.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."