North Korea fired a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile toward the sea on Sunday, South Korea’s military said, two months after the North claimed to have tested engines for a new harder-to-detect missile capable of striking distant U.S. targets in the region.
The launch was the North’s first this year. Experts say North Korea could ramp up its provocative missile tests as a way to influence the results of South Korea’s parliamentary elections in April and the U.S. presidential election in November.
That is a picture of a guy who’s going to live a long, long time.
He supposedly already has plans for his… sister? to take over if he dies.The bigger peoblem is they’re a bigger warhawk than kimmy.
Isn’t that the same sister that western media was fawning over when they thought the current leader had died?
Surely. I doubt they’d fawn over anyone else.
She may already be the actual decision-maker/leader and he’s just a figurehead. There’s quite a bit of evidence that’s the case.
Hmm, that’d definitely explain the rise in warhawkery.
Title SHOULD read…
“North Korea launches a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile that can reach distant US bases…ONCE.”
NK would be a smoldering pile of radioactive ash before it made a second launch. And Lil’ Kim knows it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement that it detected the launch of a ballistic missile of an intermediate-range class from the North’s capital region on Sunday afternoon.
The Japanese coast guard, quoting the Defense Ministry, said the suspected missile was believed to have landed in the ocean.
In mid-November, North Korea’s state media said it had successfully tested solid-fuel engines for a new intermediate-range ballistic missile that observers say is likely designed to hit U.S. military bases in Okinawa, Japan and the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam.
Leader Kim Jong Un, during visits last week to munitions factories, called South Korea “our principal enemy” and threatened to annihilate it if provoked, the North’s state media said Wednesday.
Experts say Kim likely wants to see South Korean liberals pursue rapprochement with North Korea while maintaining a parliamentary majority status and for former U.S. President Donald Trump to be elected again.
In a key ruling party meeting in late December, Kim vowed to expand his nuclear arsenal and launch additional spy satellites to cope with what he called U.S.-led confrontational moves.
The original article contains 535 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Wonder how much of this is in response to US war hawks screeching about Iran and Yemen. It’s a pretty good deterrent for a nuclear capable country to say, “if you try anything on us we can target your cities.”
What’s there to deter? Anything NK could do to the US that would serve as a deterrent would immediately result in the US glassing Pyongyang. Lil Kim isn’t Putin. He doesn’t have a half-century of stockpiles to rattle at the US to pretend MAD is still a thing. And neither Putin nor Poohbear would lift a finger to stop it either, because NK’s friendship just isn’t that valuable, and it won’t be for another several decades of pouring the entire GDP into buildup, if ever. US war hawks don’t care about North Korea because they don’t have to.
A deterrent means they don’t strike first. The US remains the only country to strike first.
Citation needed.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
He means nukes
Please tell me how many countries have used nuclear weapons, and how many countries have invaded other countries with nuclear weapons.
So you’re suggesting that North Korea is demonstrating its ballistic missiles solely in order to deter the United States from unilaterally launching an unprovoked surprise nuclear strike against North Korea. …
Okay.
Let’s talk about this, I guess.
In the universe in which the US launches an unprovoked surprise nuclear attack against North Korea, I’d like to think we could all agree that the rest of the world, including other nuclear powers, would be united in retaliating, NK ballistic missiles or not. Sure, it’s not impossible that the US government could become irrational, but that’s I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that nuclear deterrence is about more than that.
Even allowing ad arguendo a Hiroshima-like escalation scenario, we don’t actually need the US’s nuclear arsenal to do that (see: Tokyo and Berlin bombing campaigns). That is to say–to the extent that NK being a nuclear power might play in an actual deterrence scenario, it’s redundant. In all other scenarios, we’re not using 1945 military doctrine anyway.
The US has invaded countries for made up reasons. See Iraq, 2003.
US bad. Got it.
There was a lot more rhetoric against North Korea in the 00s until they confirmed having a nuke.
Exactly.
I think it’s just Guam they can hit with this rocket. The big news is it uses solid state rockets, those are harder to detect on radar.
Old fashioned spinning disk rockets are still best for media storage, though.
