San Diego ‘likley’ will be in NK range

NORTH Korea’s intercontinental ballistic missile is “likely” to be able to deliver a 500-kilogram warhead to San Diego within two years, a US monitoring group said yesterday, after its launch sparked alarm last week.

The nuclear-armed state’s first successful ICBM test was described by leader Kim Jong-un as a gift to “American b—”.

The Hwasong-14 missile is currently estimated to have a range of 7,000-8,000 kilometres – enough to reach Alaska or Hawaii – aerospace engineer John Schilling wrote on the respected 38 North website, a monitoring project linked to Johns Hopkins University.

“If the Hwasong-14 is put together the way we think it is, it can probably do a bit better than that when all the bugs are worked out,” he wrote, projecting a range of 9,700 kilometres with a 500-kg warhead on board. “The North Koreans won’t be able to achieve this performance tomorrow, but they likely will eventually.”

At present it would be “lucky to hit even a city-sized target”, he said, citing limits to its re-entry technology.

But with “a year or two of additional testing and development”, he added, “it will likely become a missile that can reliably deliver a single nuclear warhead to targets along the US west coast, possibly with enough accuracy to destroy soft military targets like naval bases”, such as that at San Diego in California.