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from the plans-are-for-next-launch-to-put-DC-in-oven dept.
North Korea's latest missile launch appears to put Washington, D.C., in range (archive)
North Korea appears to have launched another intercontinental ballistic missile, the Pentagon said Tuesday, with experts calculating that Washington, D.C., is now technically within Kim Jong Un's reach.
[...] The missile launched early Wednesday local time traveled some 620 miles and reached a height of about 2,800 miles before landing off the coast of Japan, flying for a total of 54 minutes. This suggested it had been fired almost straight up — on a "lofted trajectory" similar to North Korea's two previous intercontinental ballistic missile tests. [...] If it had flown on a standard trajectory designed to maximize its reach, this missile would have a range of more than 8,100 miles, said David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. [...] The U.S. capital is 6,850 miles from Pyongyang.
Although it may be cold comfort, it is still unlikely that North Korea is capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the U.S. mainland. Scientists do not know the weight of the payload the missile carried, but given the increase in range, it seems likely that it carried a very light mock warhead, Wright said. "If true, that means it would not be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to this long distance, since such a warhead would be much heavier," he said in a blog post.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday November 29 2017, @09:21AM
So basically everyone in the world is now a sitting duck because none of them wanted to do the necessary. Yes, North Korea has a lot of artillery they can fire at South Korea. That's rough. Now they have that artillery, and nuclear armed ICBMs. Super improvement of the situation, there, guys. And that happened because China and the US and Japan and everyone else dithered. Now the price of putting the mad dog down has jumped up by millions.
There are those who claim air power could not solve this problem, and yet air power has done a nice job reducing all kinds of organized resistance, the kind of resistance needed to organize mass artillery strikes and nuclear attacks, for, what, the last 20 years? The Gulf War was handily won thanks to it, and Saddam's Iraq at the time had one of the largest armies in the world that all the hand-wringing nay-sayers said we'd never beat on the ground. The Iraq War, and Afghanistan both quickly brushed aside the governments thanks to air power. It would do the same, here, with the added bonus that you don't need to worry about any insurgency if you have no intention of occupying territory.
I still say the smart thing would be to put the onus on China to control its client state. The mad dog is on their porch, and it's their responsibility to put it down. Any claim they might stake to being a great power and having global influence is a joke if they can't even control the thing they've had on a leash for the last 60 years.
Washington DC delenda est.