One less thing to worry about
This morning, I talked to my stepbrother on the phone; he told me that “they” found an exploded North Korean missile in the Alaskan outback. I went to my window, but I didn’t hear the screams of any fighter jets taking off from L.A. Air Force Base (I bet they stencil that name in pink cursive script). So I calmly turned to Google to settle things.
By the way, if I understand right, any missile that exceeds the specs for “short-range” becomes a “long-range missile”–there’s no “medium” class. Iraq, for example, has long-range missiles that can travel all of 20 miles farther than the short-range limit. (That’s not far enough to reach Israel, in case anybody was wondering.) Anyway, back to the North Korean menace:
“The only test of a longer range missile occurred in August 1998, when the three-stage Taepo Dong 1 (TD-1) missile was launched in an attempt to place a small satellite in orbit. This effort was not successful due to a failure of the missile’s third stage…the missile cannot be considered operational without further testing…Even if the TD-1 were successfully tested in the future, it would have limited capability and could at best deliver a small payload as far as Alaska or Hawaii…Moreover, North Korea has not flight tested a reentry heat shield for a long-range missile, and would need to do so before it could use it to deliver a warhead.”
Of course, the Alaskan press takes this a bit more seriously.