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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!
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.
They don't have real nukes or ballistic missiles, yes, as that needs tech. They do have, though, an enormous number of 1950-era pieces of conventional artillery that would kill millions in northern parts of South Korea. This includes Seoul which is close to the border and whose metro area makes up roughly half of South Korea's population.
And that artillery is well dug-in in mountainous terrain so even nuking them wouldn't stop the carnage.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
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.
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.
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...