The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HOW FAR NORTH KOREA’S LATEST MISSILE COULD FLY
It is unclear if North Korea can deliver a nuclear warhead.
Friday’s test was the second launching of a ballistic missile in 24 days.
North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile Friday that, for the first time, appeared capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States, according to experts — a milestone that American presidents have long declared the United States could not tolerate.
The launching, the North’s second of an intercontinental missile in 24 days, did not answer the question of whether it has mastered all the technologies needed to deliver a nuclear weapon to targets in the United States. But just a few days ago, the Defense Intelligence Agency warned the Trump administration that the North would probably be able to do so within a year, and Friday’s test left little doubt that Kim Jung Un, the North Korean leader, is speeding toward that goal.
The missile launched Friday remained aloft for roughly 47 minutes, according to U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials, following a sharp trajectory that took it roughly 2,300 miles into space. It then turned and arced steeply down into the sea near the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido.
If that trajectory were flattened out — a step the North may have avoided for fear of a U.S. military response — the missile could have put a number of major U.S. cities at risk, experts say.
“Depending on how heavy a warhead it carries, this latest North Korean missile would easily reach the West Coast of the United States with a range of 9,000 to 10,000 kilometers,” or 5,600 to 6,200 miles, said Kim Dong-yub, a defense analyst at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul, South Korea. “With this missile, North Korea leaves no doubt that its missile has a range that covers most of the United States.”
The United States has gone to extraordinary lengths to slow North Korea’s missile testing program — feeding flawed parts into the North Korean production system and attacking the missile program in cyberspace to cause test failures. Just a few hours before the test, Congress passed the latest round of sanctions aimed at squeezing the North.
While there have been some tactical successes that slowed the North Koreans, they ultimately have not stopped the weapons program.
And Kim, determined to show the United States that he would not waver from his goal, has stepped up the pace of testing.
The White House had no immediate comment.
For President Donald Trump, the launch poses one of the biggest challenges of his new presidency. Like Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama before him, Trump has declared that the North would not succeed in obtaining a missile that could put U.S. cities at risk.
“It won’t happen,” he declared in a Jan. 2 tweet, not long after Obama warned him that the North would probably pose the most urgent national security threat he would face.
U.S. officials, led by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have been careful not to threaten a pre-emptive strike on the North’s nuclear and missile capabilities, which Mattis has warned could reignite the Korean War. Cyberattacks, while more politically palatable, are of uncertain effectiveness. And sanctions have done little.
Now, outside experts said, it has happened. David C. Wright, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private anti-proliferation group in Cambridge, Mass., said in a blog post Friday that the missile appeared to have an effective range of at least 6,500 miles — putting Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago well within range. He wrote that Boston and New York “may be just within range, and Washington may be just out of range.”
But such estimates always are subject to interpretation. North Korea’s aim is famously poor, and it is unclear how long it would take the country to build a workable nuclear warhead that can survive re-entry into the atmosphere.
Wright also cautioned that Western analysts have no idea of how much the payload on the missile weighed. “If it was lighter than the actual warhead the missile would carry,” he noted, the calculated ranges for a real warhead would be shorter.
The Pentagon confirmed that it had detected the missile launching from North Korea, but gave no estimates of how far it flew into space or what its actual range might be.
North Korea conducted its first test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-14, on July 4, calling it a “gift package for the Yankees.” South Korean officials have said the July 4 test demonstrated that the missile was capable of reaching Alaska, but that it remained unclear whether the North had mastered all the technologies needed to deliver a nuclear warhead to targets in the continental United States.
Early today, the South Korean military said in a statement that the latest test “is a more advanced ICBMclass missile” than the one launched July 4.
It said Friday’s missile was launched from a site in Jagang province, a mountainous north-central area of North Korea bordering on China, at 11:41 p.m. local time Friday.
South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, called an emergency meeting of his National Security Council and ordered his military to conduct joint ballistic missile tests with the U.S. military in a “strong show of power,” his office said. Similar missile exercises were held following the North’s July 4 launching.
The growing North Korean threat also prompted Moon to reverse his decision to halt deployment of an advanced U.S. missile defense system known as THAAD. In a statement issued early today, he told his military to push ahead with the THAAD system.