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Home » Those Nutty Norks
Those Nutty Norks
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
Underway for two weeks now, North Korea’s unimposing merchant ship Kang Nam 1 continues her mystery trip through the South China Sea at a sedate 10 knots. I expect this is for better fuel economy but not because her captain or Kim Jong Il want to be green. According to the Associated Press, anonymous U.S. intelligence sources said on Tuesday that she altered course back north and is now about 250 miles south of Hong Kong.
Kang Nam 1 is believed by some Western authorities to possibly be bound, or at least originally have been bound, for Myanmar with an export shipment of conventional arms — maybe mortars, or perhaps missile parts. Herein lies the rub. After Kim’s second-ever atom bomb test in May, the UN passed a resolution, binding on all member states, which gives the appearance of establishing a quarantine against maritime transport of arms or nuclear-related items for sale by the DPRK. But the resolution lacks teeth. If Kang Nam 1 can somehow make it to a friendly destination (Myanmar, or back to her starting point of Nampo, or somewhere else) without refueling in a third-party pro-UN port such as Singapore, nothing stands in her way.
A U.S. Navy spokesman indicated a lack of good data on both the ship’s fuel mileage and the capacity of her fuel tanks, though presumably experts can make basic estimates. It’s unclear to me from public accounts whether Kang Nam 1 was provided before departure with extra fuel, a large cache of which could simply take the form of fuel drums crammed into some of her holds. It’s also unclear what might happen if she’s met in international waters, in reasonably calm weather, by another North Korean-flagged ship, civilian or naval, that could conduct a primitive but effective underway replenishment. Kang Nam 1 has been trailed from beyond the horizon by a U.S. Navy destroyer, but the U.S. is proceeding very cautiously about making any sort of demand to board and inspect the cargo.
David Sanger of the New York Times suggests that Kang Nam 1’s voyage might be a provocation designed to embarrass America. I’m inclined to agree. Sean McGuire of Reuters hints that increasing leaks of outside reality into North Korea could undermine the credibility of Kim’s strident anti-U.S. rhetoric among his own people, weakening his power. To dramatically innoculate the populace against such “external disinformation” would give Kim ample motive to have set up Kang Nam 1 as bait in an elaborate propaganda trap.
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Posted in Those Nutty Norks | 38 Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
A June 18 AP story reports that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) plans to launch a Taepodong-2 ballistic missile toward Hawaii in early July — possible on July 4.
The missile has a maximum range of 4,000 miles, and so will land at least 500 miles short of Hawaii. Coming so soon after Kim Jong Il’s second-ever nuclear test on May 25, one wonders what the isolated and eccentric Communist dictator is really up to.
Some analysts have said that the nuclear test, in defiance of international pressures, was intended mainly for its effect on domestic DPRK politics. Kim recently annointed his younger son, little-known Kim Jong Un, as his successor, in what pundits describe as a peculiar North Korean-style Communist dynasty. If founding father of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung, can be labeled Kim I (“Kim the First”), that makes Kim Jong Il become Kim II. His second son, now elevated to crown prince, would then become Kim III when ailing Kim II dies, which might be soon. As one sign of the raising of Kim Jong Un within North Korean politics and society (the two are closely related), he was recently granted a special name, “Brilliant Comrade,” similar in tone to his father’s “Dear Leader.“
In understanding Kim II’s real motives behind these dramatic weapon tests, we need to remember that he wants what he wants, not what we think he wants or ought to want. To fail to focus on the infamously enigmatic Kim solely from his own perspective is to commit “mirroring” — always a mistake in modern geopolitics.
Much of the time, a dictator’s top priority is to maintain his/her own power. In the case of an actual or de facto monarch, there is also a powerful drive to keep the throne within the family, for a dynasty that goes on for many generations. If Kim Jong Il is acting now like King Kim II, which he has been for years to some degree, he may be thinking now as King Kim II as well. The self-imposed isolation of his well defended country would be one element of the throne’s self-perpetuation. Establishing a clear heir to the throne would be another.
A very important third would be the need for foreign exchange monies with which to feed and clothe his people — and with which to keep his military happy enough to maintain him and his offspring in power forever. A big international concern is that Kim II might sell a working, weaponized nuke to terrorists, perhaps for the “black market going rate” of $100 million. In these monarchical terms, his goal in doing so would be to refill the royal coffers for a while.
If the second underground nuke test was a weird form of fireworks celebration for Brilliant Comrade’s annointment, the impending ICBM test might be a gesture demanding international respect for this Kim Dynasty, combined with what could well be a gesture intended as a ransom note in a case of global nuclear blackmail — more properly, of grandiose extortion.
Why wouldn’t China offer to buy out any nukes that Kim II might move close to selling, perhaps at a price of two or ten times the going rate for the ilk of al Qaeda? Beijing could simply provide to Kim Jong Il, as “foreign aid,” a few briefcases full of a tiny fraction of the U.S. Treasury bonds they own. This would be a bargain, compared to the benefits to ultra-ambitious and autocratic China of maintaining peace and stability in Asia and preventing the global destabilization that a terrorist nuke blast would surely create. After all, China continues to show some disregard for human rights, so why should it care overly much for the welfare of Kim II’s subjects? Foreign aid like this would actually or at least potentially improve the welfare of those subjects.
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Posted in Those Nutty Norks | 45 Comments »
Sunday, April 5th, 2009
 Northern Command reports:
North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command officials acknowledged today that North Korea launched a Taepo Dong 2 missile at 10:30 p.m. EDT Saturday which passed over the Sea of Japan/East Sea and the nation of Japan.
Stage one of the missile fell into the Sea of Japan/East Sea. The remaining stages along with the payload itself landed in the Pacific Ocean.
Sounds like the second stage never separated –or ignited– giving the birdie about as much thrust as a slab of granite. Hence the splish-splash just east of Japan. No doubt if we were the shooters, we’d call it a catastrophic success. Bureaucracy!
I’m sure the only people more disappointed than the Nork regime are our friendly neighborhood MDA suits, who were counting on the launch to calibrate their radars and to remain relevant.
Quote of the day, from the most righteous Arms Control Wonk blog: Oh-for-three. These guys really suck.
–John Noonan
Posted in Those Nutty Norks | 20 Comments »
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
North Korea’s newly-tested nuke is bad news, for sure. But the bigger worry, says Popular Mechanics is the “huge arsenal of mass casualty weapons” that Kim & Co. have been assembling for 45 years: biological and chemical arms.
While it would be foolish not to be gravely concerned about North Korea’s purported development of an offensive nuclear capability, the actual threat for the foreseeable future is, arguably, minimal. North Korea’s threadbare economy (it has a GDP of $40 billion — compare that to California’s gross state product on $1.55 trillion per year) is incapable of maintaining an effective nuclear weapons program. Its nuclear science is at best second rate and, certainly, is second hand.
In contrast, as one North Korea expert explained to me, CBW is mass destruction on the cheap. “Biological and chemical weapons are very inexpensive, many, many times cheaper than nuclear.” Another expert gave this grim assessment: “The use of anthrax is a distinct possibility for this nation [North Korea]…“
The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewedwhich is backed up by the available open source material-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks “amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world.” South Korea’s military estimates half of North’s long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable…
Yet the West’s myopic obsession with North Korea’s nuclear efforts has allowed this far more real and equally lethal threat to escape into the shadows: a WMD program, backed by in excess of 13,000 specially trained troops, capable of devastating its southern neighbor, attacking U.S. troops in Asia and disrupting the regional economy in ways that could see the U.S. and other western nations plunged into crisis.
Yes, the new [United Nations] resolution 1718(2006) includes a reference to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, but only as an afterthought, and the resolution exists only because of the nukes and their perceived threat. Unfortunately, in this case, as with others, the world is overly focused on a potential retina-searing nuclear detonation, without properly appreciating the very clear-and-present CBW killer that exists just a virtual button’s push away from Kim Jong Il’s perfectly manicured fingernails.
If the whole thing sounds a little hysterical to you, chem-bio guru Jason Sigger says: get real. The story is “100 percent right in regards to N. Korea. And you can extend that argument to China, Iran, Syria, Israel, Pakistan, and India, and potentially in the near future (because of Iran), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others.”
Seriously, I see this all the time in the “combating WMD” community. The arms control and counterproliferation people talk “WMD” but the subtext is “nuke.” Even the majority of the consequence management tasks are now “dirty bomb” or “improvised nuclear device” scenarios… [the] mentality is [that] nukes are the only thing that can drastically affect US military power in any region of the world.
But there are other threats, too.
Posted in Chem-Bio, Nukes, Those Nutty Norks | 5 Comments »
Friday, October 13th, 2006
“There is no question that the political and security implications of the [recent North Korean nuclear] test are huge and almost entirely negative,” writes Ivan Oelrich, over at the Strategic Security Blog. “The technical significance of the test is somewhat less than meets the eye.“
[A week ago,] the outside world knew that the North Koreans had plutonium available from fuel rods that had been removed from the reactor at Yongbyon. We knew that at least some of the plutonium had been separated out of the fuel rods and, since separation is a fairly straightforward process, it was a fair assumption that most or all of the plutonium had been separated. So we knew about their plutonium supply (and the test tells us nothing more about that), but another key question remained: Could they fashion the plutonium into a bomb?
…Before the test, we did not know whether the North Koreans could build an implosion bomb or not. Had the test been successful, we would now know that they could, although we would still not know how close they were to a useable weapon; their test device might have weighed tons and been a once off, rigged up, laboratory experiment. But the test was not successful, so we still dont know whether the North Koreans can build a workable implosion bomb. Presumably the North Koreans learned something from the test so the probability of the next test being successful is somewhat higher than the probability that the first test would have been successful. This is not much of difference, leaving us in pretty much the same position we were in before the test…
Why might the test have failed? An implosion bomb uses conventional high explosives to compress plutonium until it becomes critical, that is, it will sustain a run-away chain reaction. The pressure from the conventional explosives has to be carefully controlled, for example, it must be symmetric or else it is like squeezing a ball of putty: pressure on one side doesnt compress the plutonium, it just squirts it out the other side. The most likely reason for the failure is some problem with the compression and there is any number of reasons why the compression might not be adequate. If the test were carefully instrumented (which is not necessarily the case), the North Koreans should be able to narrow down the cause, which will give them a much improved chance for success with their next test.
UPDATE 10/14/06 11:20 AM: “Initial environmental samples collected by a U.S. military aircraft detected signs of radiation over the Sea of Japan, possibly confirming North Korea’s nuclear test,” the Washington Post reports.
UPDATE 10/15/06 7:06 PM: “The proposition that the apparently low yield of the test is a failure is not self evident,” says Defense Tech pal John Pike, pointing to this Weekly Standard piece. After all, Pike notes, the yield on the American B61 nuke can range anywhere from a third of a kiloton to more than 350 kt.
UPDATE 10/15/06 7:23 PM: No excerpt will do justice to this epic retelling of North Korea 50-year quest for the Bomb. So just go and read the whole thing.
Posted in Nukes, Those Nutty Norks | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
There are still a whole heap of unknowns, in the wake of North Korea’s nuclear test. But here’s something you can take to the bank: every admiral, every Air Force general, and every Congresscritter with a big, hulking, weapon system is going to crow about how his gazillion-dollar machine is the key to fixing the Korean problem.
 Even before Kim’s October surprise, Air Force officials like Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap Jr. were railing against “boots-on-the-ground zealots” and “neo-Luddites” who “quot[e] counterinsurgency manuals from the horse cavalry era.” Instead, Dunlap insisted, we should be pouring money into “air power our most effective national security component.“
With the Army lobbying for a bigger chunk of the Pentagon budget, expect the volume on these Air Force and Navy-first screams to be turned up several notches in the months to come. Wanna shell the Norks’ nuke facilities from way out in the sea? Then you need a big ol’ DD(X) destroyer to do the shelling. Attacking from the air? For that, you just have to have a next-generation, long-range bomber. Oh, and a whole bunch of conventionally-armed Trident ballistic missiles, too. And so on…
Of course, “American air units in South Korea, Japan, and the United States, plus the US Third and Seventh Fleets, are available to blockade North Korea and strike at targets of opportunity” today, Arms and Influence notes.
However, it remains to be seen what opportunities for punitive and disarming strikes exist, or what the North Korean response would be… The facilities are too dispersed, often in the worst kind of geography for precision bombing, mountainous terrain. Even if the US were able to hit every North Korean nuclear and production facility, the obvious question would be, What’s next?
We can predict at least one immediate consequence: a North Korean attack on South Korea. Whether the North Korean army tries to seize control of the South, or merely retaliate with conventional and chemical artillery attacks on Seoul and other population centers, the US would need ground forces to take the next step: eliminate the North Korean government. Even with its nuclear fangs removed, the North Korean government would remain a menace to the South, and perhaps would have reasons to try for one last gamble to end the decades-long stalemate on the Korean peninsula…
The United States has an impressive array of carrier battle groups, attack submarines, tactical air assets, and strategic bombers that it can hurl at North Korea. However, the last several years have taught Americans an important lesson about warfare: your own strength matters far less than what you actually do with it.
UPDATE 4:39 PM: The Herald-Tribune has a good rundown of just how piss-poor the Norks’ conventional forces really are.
The military in North Korea is by far the largest consumer of the countrys scarce resources. But even so, its combat jet pilots get only about two hours of flying time a month, its soldiers sometimes have to grow their own food, and much of its equipment is old and outclassed by that of its neighbors. According to South Korean and Western experts, if a conventional war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula, the best the North Korean military could manage would be to fight to a bloody stalemate.
It is the deep insecurity born of these shortcomings, the experts say, and not any desire to grab attention or gain leverage, that drove President Kim Jong-ils decision to defy international warnings and declare this week that his country had tested a nuclear weapon.
Posted in Money Money Money, Strategery, Those Nutty Norks | 29 Comments »
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
So here we are, 36 hours later, and everybody is still talking about North Korea’s nuclear test. But despite all the nervous chatter, not much has changed, at least in the short term. (Down the road is a much different story.)
 Condemnations of the Norths brazen act aside, China is no more willing now than they were last week to risk a collapsed regime on their border — it almost assures a flood of refugees and a US military ally sharing a border with China. The USs options are similarly limited even if we know where all their nuclear sites are, its unlikely wed be willing to bet that the unpredictable Kim regime wouldnt retaliate against Seoul. That leaves us to do what weve gotten good at with North Korea: issuing a strong condemnation and then hoping that CNN switches back over to coverage of Jon Benet Ramsey.
The only big potential short term implication is if the international community demonstrates that this test was a fake, or a dud. Then the North will be forced to up the ante to compensate for the embarrassment (just as the nuke test was to compensate for the humiliating failure of the July long range missile test).
The real impact of the Kim’s nuclear trial is in the long term. That’s when things have the potential to get extremely scary. Not only do you get the possibility of the Norks throwing a nuclear yard sale for terrorists. But for Japans new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, it energizes his push to strengthen Japans security capacity like nothing else could have. Abe had already appointed a number of fellow conservatives in Foreign Ministry and Defense positions in the cabinet, hes declared his intent to modify the constitutions limitations on Japanese military capacity, and he mooted the possibility for a Japanese pre-emptive strike against North Korea in the aftermath of the July missile tests. The pacifist nature of Japans constitution is reasonably well-ingrained in Japanese political culture, and he would have met a lot of resistance in these moves. That resistance will be drastically weakened by the North Korean test. From there, its a short logical step to the usual scenarios of a Sino-Japanese arms race in East Asia. And there’s only one word for how that scenario plays out: Gulp.
– Matthew Tompkins
Posted in Nukes, Those Nutty Norks | 100 Comments »
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
In the days ahead, we’ll hear all kinds of reasons why the Nork nuke test was so sucktastic. (Suitcase bomb, anyone?) Dicky Destiny — a.k.a. Dr. George Smith, of GlobalSecurity.org — has a plausible early candidate: “‘fizzle yield’; that is, the smallest nuclear yield [a] particular device could provide.“
“… [T]here is a moment when the [bomb’s] fissile material becomes critical (projectile still on its way to its destination [in a gun-type weapon], or only a small part of the material compressed [in an implosion-type weapon]) and the time it reaches its intended state. During this interval, the degree of supercriticality is building up toward its final value. If a chain reaction were initiated by neutrons from some other source during this period, the yield realized would be much smaller –possibly a great deal smaller — than the nominal yield. Such an event is referred to as preinitiation (or sometimes predetonation).
… “If the [bomb’s] assembly velocities (of the projectile or material driven by an implosion) are quite low, the earliest possible preinitiation could lead to an energy release (equivalent weight of high explosive) not many times larger than the weight of the device.“
Other parts of the discussion on bomb design obstacles, also presented at the seminar, indicated that yields lower by a factor of ten in crude designs can be indicative of fizzles. What information has been published on the North Korean test falls into this range.
Summarized, there are certain number of things that can go wrong when firing your first atomic bomb, particularly when using a crude design. And one might expect to see them from a weird and crazy hermit nation, like North Korea, endeavoring to enter the nuclear club.
Posted in Nukes, Those Nutty Norks | 39 Comments »
Monday, October 9th, 2006
HA HA HA HA.
I — Jeffrey Lewis, crossposting from Arms Control Wonk — love the US Geological Survey.
They’ve published lat/long (41.294 N, 129.134 E) and Mb estimates (4.2) for the North Korean test.
There is lots of data floating around: The CTBTO called it 4.0; The South Koreans report 3.58–3.7.
 You’re thinking, 3.6, 4.2, in that neighborhood. Seismic scales, like the Richter, are logarithmic, so that neighborhood can be pretty big.
But even at 4.2, the test was probablya dud.
Estimating the yield is tricky business, because it depends on the geology of the test site. The South Koreans called the yield half a kiloton (550 tons), which is more or less — a factor of two — consistent with the relationship for tests in that yield range at the Soviet Shagan test site:
Mb = 4.262 + .973LogW
Where Mb is the magnitude of the body wave, and W is the yield.
3.58–3.7 gives you a couple hundred tons (not kilotons), which is pretty close in this business unless you’re really math positive. The same equation, given the US estimate of 4.2, yields (pun intended) around a kiloton.
A plutonium device should produce a yield in the range of the 20 kilotons, like the one we dropped on Nagasaki. No one has ever dudded their first test of a simple fission device. North Korean nuclear scientists are now officially the worst ever.
Of course, I want to see what the US IC says. If/when the test vents, we could have some radionuclide data — maybe in the next 72 hours or so.
But, from the initial data, I’d say someone with no workable nuclear weapons (Kim Jong Il, I am looking at you) should be crapping his pants right now.
First the missile, then the bomb. Got anything else you wanna try out there, chief?
– Jeffrey Lewis, cross-posted at Arms Control Wonk.com
UPDATE 10/10/06 1:14 AM: Noah here. Looks like the LA and NY Times have both picked up (sorta) on what the good Wonk was sayin’.
Throughout history, the first detonations of aspiring nuclear powers have tended to pack the destructive power of 10,000 to 60,000 tons 10 to 60 kilotons of conventional high explosives.
But the strength of the North Korean test appears to have been a small fraction of that: around a kiloton or less, according to scientists monitoring the global arrays of seismometers that detect faint trembles in the earth from distant blasts…
Philip E. Coyle III, a former director of weapons testing at the Pentagon and former director of nuclear testing for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a weapons design center in California, said the small size of the test signaled the possibility of what might be described as a partial success or a partial failure.
As first tests go, this is smaller and less successful than those of the other nuclear powers, he said.
Perhaps the North Koreans wanted to keep it small, he added. But if it turns out to be a kiloton or less, Dr. Coyle said, that would suggest that they hoped for more than that and didnt get it.
UPDATE 10/10/06 8:45 AM: Rumor alert! Stratfor is pretty sure that the Nork nuke — “about one-fortieth of the Nagasaki blast” — was a dud, too. But, just to be on the safe side, the intel service offers up “three possible explanations for the apparently small yield: the North Koreans deliberately detonated a very small device, they tested a larger device but it failed to execute properly, or the explosion was not caused by an atomic device.”
Possibly the North Koreans wanted to show that they had the technology but did not want to appear too threatening, so they minimized the size. Or they could be demonstrating the ability to use lower-yield nuclear mines or artillery shells that would protect North Korea by blocking strategic passes into the country, and would possibly threaten Seoul but would not pose a significant threat elsewhere. Also, the water table is high in the area of the blast; maybe they were being careful not to break into the aquifer.
These are all good reasons, but the counterargument is that if you are going to go nuclear, go nuclear. North Korea does not have a pressing need — or history — of being subtle, so a small blast doesn’t fit in with its plan…
What if the North Koreans didn’t go nuclear, but detonated a large chemical explosive in an underground chamber? It would take a lot of explosive to yield that result, but it is not impossible. A chemical explosion would have a different seismic signature than a nuclear one, and therefore geologists should have already discounted this theory; but the analysis is going to take up to two days, according to the White House. It is certainly not beyond the North Koreans to fake a nuclear explosion, and there have been some big explosions in North Korea that have been mistaken, for a short period of time, for something nuclear. But there is no evidence, beyond our speculation, for this theory.
UPDATE 10/10/06 8:51 AM: Interesting counter-argument from Trent Telenko in the comments. Since North Korea has “had the complete design specifications for a Chinese missile-ready nuclear warhead of the plutonium implosion type for years,” thanks to the A.Q. Khan network, this dud may be more dangerous than it seems.
Posted in Eat DT's Dust, Nukes, Those Nutty Norks | 142 Comments »
Thursday, July 6th, 2006
The New York Times and others are framing North Korea’s busted missile test as a major problem for the U.S. — especially with China and Russia refusing to take a hard line against Pyongyang, for now. “President Bush and his national security advisers found themselves on Wednesday facing what one close aide described as an array of ‘familiar bad choices,’” the Times said.
 That seems a little upside-down to me. Isn’t Kim Jong-il the one with the bad choices here, now that his supposedly-intercontinental missile flopped less than a minute into its flight?
“Over these past few years, [Kim] has adroitly played his otherwise miserable hand because of two cards that everyone believes he holdsnuclear weapons and long-range missiles. Yesterday’s dud raises the possibility that the missile card’s a bluff, that there may be (as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland) ‘no there there,’” says Slate’s Fred Kaplan.
“Seems to me their ICBM [intercontinental ballistic missile] capability has gone no better than sideways the past eight years, if not down,” retired Adm. Dennis Blair, a former chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, tells the Washington Post.
“Less threatening, because less capable,” agreed Rep. Mark S. Kirk (R-Ill.), who tracks North Korea.
At the same time, South Korea — which had been keeping the U.S. at arm’s length — is now drawing us in a little closer. Reunification talks with the Norks will continue. But the South is now looking to put some of our short– and intermediate-range anti-missile systems into place. Seoul’s “Defense Ministry… announced it plans to introduce 48 Patriot missiles between 2008 and 2009,” according to the Chosun Ilbo. “After 2009, it will introduce SM-2 Block-IV sea-to-air interceptor missiles to be carried on Aegis ships to counter the North Korean missile threat.“
 Japan, meanwhile, is barring North Korea ships and flights — after agreeing to install new missile interceptors of its own, last month.
So: allies better defended, and adversaries shown to be weak. That’s all good news, right?
UPDATE 11:14 AM: Unlike Phil Coyle, William Arkin thinks the American warning system did a good job of picking up on those Nork launches.
Within seconds of North Korean rocket engines igniting on their launch pads, infrared cameras aboard Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites detected the heat and transmitted an alert back to U.S. command centers in Colorado Springs, where the trajectory was calculated and the type of missile determined.
Those U.S. infrared satellites had been primed for over a month by activity at the launch sites, intelligence sources say. Movement was detected by spy satellites and U-2s, signals were intercepted by NSA. North Korea even reportedly issued a standard public “notice to mariners” announcing a military exercise and missile test.
UPDATE 11:39 AM: Plus, the Missile Defense Agency has to be psyched that it didn’t have to fire off its ICBM interceptors, since they haven’t been successfully tested in nearly four years. “The apparent failure of a North Korean long-range missile gives the Pentagon some breathing room as it prepares two critical tests for a U.S. missile shield,” the Wall Street Journal notes.
To bolster military and political confidence in the shield, the Pentagon next month plans to launch an interceptor missile in California to counter a mock enemy missile fired from Alaska. The primary goal of the trial isn’t to destroy the dummy warhead, said Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency. Instead, it is to test the shield’s command-and-control system and ensure that a key radar system tracks the warhead and transmits information to the interceptor.
Later this year, the agency plans a so-called hit-to-kill test that will aim to destroy a dummy warhead. Pentagon officials say the two tests, which will cost between $85 million and $100 million each, make 2006 the key year for validating the missile-shield concept. “We believe that we have demonstrated that the hit-to-kill technology works. What we’re going to do is try to show that we can do it reliably and that we can sustain it,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said in an interview earlier this year.
UPDATE 1:49 PM: One other nice thing about the North Korean launch is that it gives the U.S. military a whole lot of data about a missile it didn’t know much about before. Thanks, Kim!
Posted in Missiles, Strategery, Those Nutty Norks | 14 Comments »
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