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North Korea Ballistic Missile Explodes On Launch Fourth Straight Time
Earlier this week, the state media of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) broadcasted video of leader Kim Jong Un watching what appears to have been a successful launch of a submarine-launched ballistic missile. That was all fabricated, according to analysts. According to them, the launch actually took place in April. It is believed that the video was broadcasted as "an attempt to demonstrate North Korea's nuclear threat as a senior DPRK official meets with China this week." Ars Technica reports: The video was broadcast just after analyst reports said North Korea had made a fourth failed attempt in two months to test-launch the Musudan -- a missile designed to strike at targets as distant as Guam and the Philippines. The missile exploded on launch. Earlier on April 15, North Korea's military attempted a launch from a mobile launching system, but it exploded shortly after liftoff. Just two weeks later, as North Korea was preparing for the congress of the Worker's Party, there was an attempt at a dual launch -- with both missiles crashing into the sea.
...when technical decisions are made for political reasons.
At least, that is my assumption as to why they keep failing. I imagine that at every level of organization throughout the team building and launching these missiles, egos are driving people to hide mistakes that need correcting, to promote people with connections but not talent, to skip work in order to meet deadlines, etc.
I think we should be thanking the North Koreans for demonstrating that making ballistic missiles that actually work isn't easy.
Historically, nations that follow these sorts of practices become self-limiting in their ability to cause widespread geopolitical problems, at least pushing it out a few generations. Other nations have stunted their technical and scientific growth massively in the past, for reasons which make little sense today, like China destroying the largest navy in the known history of the earth in 1525 and banning construction of ships with more than two masts.
Given how many failures they've had, it's amazing they have any engineers left.
Then again, maybe that's the problem. All of the good engineers were "retired" after bad launches and now they're stuck with guys who have no experience in engineering and are struggling to make sense of the equations lest they be "retired" also.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Watching North Korea fail, and do so repeatedly is really funny. What is not funny is their determination. I note that others are suggesting that their rocket scientists are probably short-lived, as are their nuclear scientists. Nonsense. Kim Jong Un does offer special favors for those persons who are successful but a nuclear scientist or a rocket scientist are unlikely to challenge him or his heirs to government positions of power. They are scientists, not political operatives and, thus, are seen as commodities to be used, not existential challenges to be met.
The determination they are showing that they will do everything in their power, including starve their people, in order to produce weapons of mass-destruction is the real takeaway here. While I am happy at their repeated failures, I am not happy at their persistence.
Gods don't kill people, people with gods kill people.
Or maybe it's just hard, especially for a country of 24.9 million people that's largely isolated from the rest of the world. That's about 1/10 the size of the Soviet Union when they launched Sputnik (about 205 million), and the Soviet Union had considerable access to western knowledge both through espionage and German rocket scientists they snapped up.
All that said, the idea that engineers are executed on failures is wishful thinking. The path to success goes through multiple failures, and the best possible scenario for anyone who doesn't want to see North Korea obtain long range missile capabilities would be for the regime to punish failure severely.
It is encouraging that their failure rate is so high. But we shouldn't take too much encouragement from that. Just getting to the point where you can fail isn't exactly easy, and if you learn from those failures and funding doesn't dry up, eventually you will succeed. The German Aggregat rocket series (which culminated in the A4 rocket, more popularly known as the "V2") was riddled with discouraging failures though the early years, but the Germans kept pouring money into it. Granted they had the best rocket minds in the world, but they were living in a vacuum tube world where telemetry was much harder to obtain. They had to guess their way through their failures. The North Koreans don't -- not to the same degree.
If they carry on, the North Koreans will eventually succeed in making something that works well enough to threaten other countries with.
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