North Korea is launching missiles at the rate of one every few weeks, and some are ICBMs. The latest one was launched over Japan and fell into the sea. That means the launch direction is towards the North American continent. Neither Japan nor the US took any action this time.
So how can we tell the difference between these supposed tests and the real thing? Wait until one explodes over Nome or Redmond? How close do they have to come before we do something?
How close do they have to come before we do something?
I’d say the cart section of one of You Know Whose golf courses.
Gotta run. The bus to Hell is leaving and I want a window seat.:eek:
Sorry, I just can’t take any more.
It is my (non-expert) understanding that the missiles that NK have been launching so far have far too high a trajectory for them to be able reach the US mainland. Presumably if NK launches a missile with a lower trajectory the alarm bells would start going off.
But a lower trajectory doesn’t mean it can make it to the US mainland. It would have to be an ICBM, too, so whatever detection methods are in use has to know this, and know it within seconds of a launch. Can this be done?
For context, the DPRK also fired a missile over Japan in 1998 and 2009, and a missile into Japanese waters in 2016. There were some tests in 2006, and they may have put an object into orbit in 2012.
My WAG is that if a North Korean ICBM came flying over the CONUS 48 states, it wouldn’t be a first-time thing out of the blue - that would be extraordinarily foolish. Rather, it would be the last in a line of gradual progression - maybe one over Alaska, one over Hawaii, one in Pacific waters near Vancouver, and finally, one over the US itself - at which point the US would know, “OK, this is likely just a test, we won’t do anything about it except maybe intercept it with an interceptor.”
With President Trump, I imagine a missile that lands in US territorial waters or on US soil, even if there’s not a live warhead, stands an excellent chance of provoking a military response.
Why aren’t we using all these test-fires as target practice for THAAD? Are they not coming close enough?
Probably out of a desire to avoid antagonizing Kim further, but I don’t know if they’ve been within intercept envelopes for THAAD or not. There’s also a possibility that we’re not confident enough we can successfully intercept the missile to risk an embarrassing failure.
Better an embarrassing failure in peacetime than a life-losing failure in wartime. I say test the THAAD/Aegis now and work out all the bugs/kinks.
So that North Korea doesn’t know if they’re capable of getting past it.
Ballistic missiles are called that because, for most of their path, they’re ballistic. That is, they have a brief period when the rockets are firing, and then Newton’s in the driver’s seat for the rest of the way. Which means that, once the rockets stop firing, it’s really easy to calculate where it’s going to land.
That’s one consideration, certainly. Another one is that the simple act of blowing Kim’s missiles out of the sky, assuming we have the capability, might be enough to trigger a life-losing war.
I’m actually on the side of “it’d be really awesome if we’d intercept his missiles”, but I understand there are other considerations at play as well.
Conversely, the simple act of NOT blowing Kim’s missiles out of the sky could trigger a disaster if it was headed for Seattle with a nuke in the nose. Do we want to take that chance?
I believe that the missile tracking and warning systems are far more advanced than the defensive systems. Until such time as these warning systems confirm a missile on track to Seattle, the defense systems should remain on stand-by.
The risk is in using them on a test projectile headed for the middle of the China sea and the shoot down attempt failing. This would send a clear signal to NK that the defense systems are vulnerable and thus embolden the enemy.
Let’s not forget that they are not just testing their own missile technology but trying to provoke the US and allies into response in order to test their defense capabilities as well.
There’s a wholly-inappropriate joke in there, but I’ll leave it alone. No, if we actually verified that it was heading for Seattle, as opposed to the middle-of-nowhere Pacific Ocean, yes, I’d hope we’d do everything we could to intercept it before we arrived, whether we know if it has a nuke onboard or not.
It’s not really the risk you seem to think it is We’d know it was headed to Seattle not just that it went up and a general direction.
We’ve got ground based early warning radars that exist to do that along with track satellites.
We’ve also got a pretty cool deployable sea based phased array radar system to supplement those ground based radars - SBX-1. In early January guess where it was deployed to watch? 
From then SECDEF Ash Carter in the story about the SBX-1 deployment:
We’ve faced a ballistic missile threat for decades. Professionals have thought about how to get good information to support decision making without just seeing where it landed. This is not our first rodeo.