North Korea can hit most of United States: U.S. officials

[Miles Archer]

Source: Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - North Korea's latest test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) has shown that Pyongyang now may be able to reach most of the continental United States, two U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday.

The assessment, which the officials discussed on condition of anonymity, underscored the growing threat posed by Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs, and could add pressure on President Donald Trump's administration to respond.

North Korea said on Saturday it had conducted another successful test of an ICBM that proved its ability to strike America's mainland.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised the midnight launch of the missile on Friday night and called it a "stern warning" to the United States that it would not be safe from destruction if it tried to attack, the North's official KCNA news agency said.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-usa-assessment-idUSKBN1AG2J4

[elleng]

1. most of the continental United States, ???

discussed on condition of anonymity.

[Kablooie]

2. Then maybe they will happen to hit the Nevada Test Range where all the nuclear tests were done.

Which would knock out the mysterious Area 51 which is right next to it.

[still_one]

3. There is a rumor that so can Russia and China, perhaps India and Pakistan

[Xipe Totec]

4. North Korea can hit one state, at most.

Better make it count.

[George II]

5. The Soviet Union could hit ALL of the United States for decades, real American presidents...

...never felt the need to threaten to wipe out their nuclear arsenal.

[christx30]

9. But the Soviet Union was governed by

people like Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Khruschev, etc. Not a Jofffery Baratheon like Kim Jong-un. We had Mutually Assured Destruction with the Russians. Each of us knew that if we fired first, the resulting counter attack would obliterate us. Kim doesn't care.

[George II]

12. They will only get off one missile. People (trump) are acting like in 2018 or whenever suddenly....

...North Korea will have hundreds of nuclear missiles aimed at the US.

[christx30]

17. My point is that Kim would launch.

I don't think he'd hesitate for a second. Even though he knows there's no chance he'd win the exchange, or the following war. He'd do it just to prove he would. Which sucks for whatever city he hits. He couldn't destroy the whole of the US, but it'd cripple us economically. I mean.. he hits something like Los Angeles. That's going to kill thousands of people. It's going to destroy a port where millions, if not billions of dollars in overseas trade comes from. They may not have a sword, but they have a needle. And that would be straight for our heart.
We've been at war for 16 years because of airplanes in buildings killed nearly 3000 people. What happens when it's 10,000?

[politicat]

20. Great circle arcs. Over the pole.

It's easier to hit Boston(just over 10K km), NYC (10.3), D.C.(10.7) or Chicago than Seattle, SF or LA (almost 12K km) from DPRK.

Denver is probably edge of range for this one, at 11,400 km on the great circle arcs. Colorado Springs and NORAD are an additional 200km, but most of the Northeast and upper Midwest is well under the 11,000 km mark. This one had a range right around 10K per our non-proliferation and arms control wonks, and the rule of the modeling is: if the model falls just short, the model is wrong, not the missile. Nobody builds something that can't *quite* reach their ideal target. But they do test below capacity or otherwise handicap their own tests, because you can't hide a giant honkin' rocket.

Offut/SAC is harder to hit than D.C., but North Dakota and Alaska are within the prior missile's capability. (Not necessarily this one's, because it's almost as hard to make a big missile take a short trajectory as to overextend one.)

But there's no point in panicking. We have to just deal with this, and the quicker and more calmly, the better, We either now have or nearly have another ICBM nuclear power. This has been coming for most of the last decade. Lil Kim is tired of not even getting a seat at the kids' table. They are not too stupid, too disorganized or too deprived to do math and engineering. This proves it. And I'm pretty sure he's bright enough to have read the doctrine of mutually assured destruction -- he knows he gets one shot. So he's taking ever more hostages until he gets a seat at the adults' table. "We don't negotiate" is a line for fiction, not reality.

(Also of note: Beijing has been in his range for almost two decades. Same for Seoul, since the 1960s, and Tokyo. But while D.C. Is now in range... so is Moscow as of now. Funny enough, the state that's denying DPRK's new capability is Russia. They're massively myopic when they look east. Maybe on purpose, to keep their news smelling freash and fabricated. And nuclear exchange is NOT a binary system -- there are multiple eyes and trajectories can look muddy, especially when those eyes want to see poorly.)

The good news? Lil Kim smokes heavily. These missiles are liquid fueled (90/10 consensus on that.) Nobody in DPRK tells Lil Kim not to smoke wherever, whenever he wants. He is always present on the pad for fueling and launch for tests. He's been *WAY TOO CLOSE* to very large stocks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen with lit cigs in the very recent past. That's not an if situation, it's an oh-shit when.

[ancianita]

24. Not to be glib, but your range summary is probably one reason why CentCom is in Florida.

[Lurks Often]

36. Centcom was created in 1983, long before NK was considered a threat

Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Central_Command

Since Centcom replaced the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force (RDJTF), which was already based at McDill, it kept the RDJTF buildings and facilities that were on McDill AFB. Besides Pacific Command is responsible for the Korean Peninsula, not CentCom.

[ancianita]

37. I referred to its region of safety from missile delivery which, based on to your history, is

fortuitous, yes?

Aside from their history, I'm aware of the command regions, and that NK would not be its region of responsibility for responding to any NK attack.

[Lurks Often]

38. It wasn't planned that way

[Warren DeMontague]

6. Well- Thank heavens we have competent, intelligent, adult leadership in the White House, amirite?

Now excuse me while I go hide.

[Ahpook]

7. But would he?

He is crazy as hell, but why would he attempt something like this?

I am sure he knows this would be total annihilation within a week. He is not going to risk losing his life or that cesspool he presides over.

[Miles Archer]

8. Remember what Saddam said right before "Operation Desert Storm?"

It was something like "If you send U.S. troops here, their blood will flow like rivers and the jackals will drink their blood."

Yes, he's crazy. No, I don't think he's crazy enough to start a nuclear war with the United States.

Do I think Trump is crazy enough to start a nuclear war with North Korea?

Well, that's an entirely different question.

[thesquanderer]

11. "I'll see your crazy, and raise you a narcissistic buffoon." (n/t)

[Mme. Defarge]

27. Ha!

[Plucketeer]

18. Sure - he's heard the odds

But keep foremost in your mind that he's a "god". As such, he has a debt to the citizenry.

[politicat]

23. He's not crazy. He's committed, indoctrinated, religiously motivated.

And he has several million people who agree with him and will die to preserve their sense of reality.

I find him appalling, mired in his grandfather's delusion and the family legacy... but how is he different from the LDS elders in the 1870s and 80s who were born after Joseph Smith was dead, after the Deseret migration, who had never lived anything but the United effort (a form of religious communism the early LDS practiced) and polygamy as the highest aspiration and expression of their faith? Men who went to prison for their practice. Deseret considered privation, forced migration, epidemics, starvation, locusts, dust storms, blizzards, and isolation worth the effort. They were willing to walk across 1/3 of the continent and over the Continental Divide, camp in the high desert for years, dig canals with hand tools and animal muscle, coax crops out of soil and a climate that doesn't promote agriculture, distill water, and kill, lie, steal and cheat for their survival. In that era, they bought and made weapons equal to those provided by national governments. Why should we expect less of another group with similar markers, a mere century and change later?

We've got to stop thinking of DPRK as merely a nation with an unfortunate leadership. It's equally a religion, if not more so. Just because it doesn't make sense in our context doesn't mean it's insensible in theirs.

(If it's not clear, I consider DPRK a very serious threat. Were I a late 19th century citizen, I'd have similar concerns about Deseret. To a lesser extent, I still do, having grown up in the LDS culture.)

[get the red out]

28. Thank you for your insight

I never knew the religious connotations of the North Korean dictatorship. Very helpful for context!

[politicat]

33. They're not LDS, but Kim Jong Sun (grampy Kim) had a lot of religious elements

That got wrapped up in their cultural milieu. It's gets pretty scary -- take the shiftiest parts of unstudied evangelical Christianity as taught by early 20th century missionaries running through a couple of translations, add in a lot of distilled Leninist-Maoist thought with very little Trotsky, and a whole cartload of folk tradition that runs from superstition to magical thinking. Now add monarchy. Yeah. But there's religion in them thar hills.

[former9thward]

40. They are atheists.

If you are defining atheism as a religion then I guess so.

[politicat]

41. They have rejected Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and (some aspects of) Confucian thought...

But if a religion is a set of rituals, beliefs, texts and behaviors that evolve to exert social and moral control and provide comfort, a sense of power and access to the numinous for those who adhere, they certainly have developed a state religion with the Kims at the center.

The concept of juche serves as a guiding principle, which has acquired something approaching the power of magical speech within the DPRK context.

Their definition of atheism is nothing like the western version, or even the Marxist/Trotskyite version. What's written on their PR/internationally facing documents is unlike actual reported and observed aspects within the culture.

I don't define atheism as a religion. It's a philosophy at best. What DPRK does isn't atheism, nor secular humanism, nor rationalism, nor deism, nor anything on that spectrum.

[kairos12]

10. My understanding is they haven't perfected a warhead yet small enough to equip

this missile.

[Still In Wisconsin]

13. Nor have they perfected a reliable re-entry vehicle to protect said warhead...

Here's what I've read: whatever they throw up there now will burn to bits in the upper atmosphere. But yeah, they could launch a missile now and have the larger bits of the "warhead" (quotes intentional) land somewhere between the west coast and midwest.

I'm still more worried about them passing a functional device (which, obviously, they DO have) to a non-state actor in, say, a shipping container.

[Still In Wisconsin]

14. So what exactly is he playing at?

Kim is obviously an asshole of the largest magnitude, but surely he knows that launching at the US would get his country reduced to glass, with him in it. Not that he cares about the citizenry, but would HE want to die too?

[Fred Sanders]

15. Bullshit. Just more fearmongering from the MIC. Same as it ever was. Not to mention there

is the teeny problem of miniaturization of a warhead.

[PJMcK]

26. Exactly this

The report cites anonymous sources.

This is the Trump administration and the MIC softening up the country for a pre-emptive attack.

These asshats are so transparent in their "cleverness."

[ProfessorGAC]

34. What Fred Said!

I don't believe a bit of this. Miniaturizing a nuke is no simple task and this country threw a hundred missiles in the ocean in failed attempts to show how cool they were. (They weren't.)

They're already starving their people and it's taken this much focus and this much energy and money to get to this point. Where would the resources come from to suddenly be able to build ICBM's and miniaturize a nuke to that low payload mass?

I'm with you and the other poster who replied to you.

[PatrickforO]

16. Fuck. A potential war with a tough bunch of people and our leader?

A thin-skinned, man-baby who is incompetent for the office.

Shit.

Deep shit.

Because that turkey Kim Jung Un is crazy as a hoot owl, and he might just launch a nuke.

If that happens, we're fucked.

Oh, well, cheer up! We won't have to worry about global warming!



?1463072082

[Rural_Progressive]

19. All of you realize that we're being f*cked with, right?

This is sounding so much like Saddam's got WMDs be afraid, be very afraid.

Give me a break, they can barely get one of these things to clear the launch area without blowing up. The few that manage that end up crashing into the sea.

Please, please, tell me we are capable of learning from our past mistakes and it's not necessary for us to continue to be conned.

[Midnight Writer]

21. Hit us with what, exactly? If they wanted to hit us, wouldn't smuggling a bomb into our country be

like, really simple, compared to a nuclear missile weapon program?

This is massive political war gaming to transfer wealth and power to the already wealthy and powerful.

In both our countries.

[Midnight Writer]

22. Is it coincidence all this provocation is popping up right when we are debating defense spending?

Might not some enterprising journalist in a free country use their (re)sources to tell us who will profit most from this?

Then maybe follow the money to see what connections may be found?

[EX500rider]

25. It's popping up right now because right now..

....is when NK finally got a missile with the range to work.

[Not Ruth]

29. Does the US have a missile defense system?

Because we need one.

[PJMcK]

30. Well, that'll take the focus off of the Russia investigation

This story is crap. North Korea does not have the capability of miniaturizing a nuclear weapon, building a re-entry vehicle to protect and target the weapon and their missiles have not proven the ability to fly the long trajectory that an intercontinental weapon would require.

I believe this is a planted story by the Trumpers to begin to "normalize" the concept of the US preemptively attacking North Korea. It's the latest of Trump's distractions from the dangers surrounding him.

[orangecrush]

31. Great point

[Not Ruth]

32. What happens if North Korea tries to take out Nome, but takes out Big Diomede, Russia by mistake?

140 miles apart

[Javaman]

35. and all of Europe. nt

[Baclava]

39. Re-Entry Vehicle Failed During North Korea's 2nd ICBM Test

North Korea's recent intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test apparently wasn't a complete success.

The ICBM's re-entry vehicle (RV) — which would protect the missile's nuclear warhead during an operational launch — likely broke apart toward the tail end of Friday's (July 28) test flight, according to missile expert Michael Elleman.

That's the good news for the United States, South Korea and Japan, all of which nuclear-armed North Korea has repeatedly threatened to destroy. But there's bad news, too: The Hwasong-14 has demonstrated worrying range on both of its flights to date. (The first launch of the ICBM occurred on July 4.)

Indeed, in its current form, the missile may be able to hit major cities on the U.S. West Coast, Elleman said yesterday during a conference call with reporters organized by the U.S.-Korea Institute (USKI) at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.

"It's kind of a question that can't be answered with any real fidelity, but I think, assuming a 500-kilogram [1,100 lbs.] bomb, which gives you about a total of 700 kilograms [1,540 lbs.] — 150 kilograms [330 lbs.] for the re-entry vehicle itself — San Francisco, Los Angeles [and] Seattle would be threatened," Elleman said. "Possibly San Diego. Salt Lake City may be out of its range."

Putting warheads atop ICBMs requires miniaturizing the bombs. If North Korea has not already mastered this technology, they'll likely do so soon, according to American intelligence officials. Indeed, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency recently predicted that the rogue nation will have a reliable nuclear-armed ICBM system by sometime next year.

https://www.space.com/37687-north-korea-icbm-test-re-entry-vehicle.html