Anyway, today North Korea just tested yet another ballistic missile. It flew 700 km, which is not that unusual for its tests, but it did so while also reaching a maximum altitude greater than 2000 km, and that is unusual. FWIW, the US’s Minuteman III(LGM-30G) reaches a maximum altitude of 700 miles (1120 km) during its over 6000 nautical mile trajectory. The NK missile also, I’ve read, came from one of these types of road-mobile, Intermediate range ballistic missiles, visible in the video within the linked Twitter post from Jeffrey Lewis, of armscontrolwonk.com.
My question is this, if the apogee for this NK missile is roughly twice that of the Minuteman, why then has David Wright, co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, stated that the possible range for the NK missile, on a ‘normal’ trajectory, is only 2800 nautical miles or so? Is it that the Minuteman has much greater velocity when it reaches its apogee?
Also, it would be interesting to see what the potential throwweight is for this new NK missile, and whether its on par with the satellite that NK has already orbited. And how that compares to the range of weights thought reasonable for potential NK fission and perhaps multi-stage nuclear weapons.
While even this new missile is still probably not capable of reaching even Hawaii, never mind doing so with a militarily useful payload, it’s still not comforting to see NK working its way to even a poor man’s version of the Midgetman or Topol