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No it isn't. NK can arguably hit the western Alleutians, if you trust a Russian source. That's what they mean when they "continental US," stretching that reach
by thesmallestcat 9y ago
No it isn't. NK can arguably hit the western Alleutians, if you trust a Russian source. That's what they mean when they "continental US," stretching that reach is plain fear-mongering. Second, due to the planet's shape, once NK can hit LA, it can hit most of the US, and the east coast is not much of a stretch. ICBMs come in classes, so to speak, and the "next step" has nearly global reach, but keep in mind that it is still far off for NK. That's why NK's repeated threat recently is to Guam, and the jury is out on if NK can even pull that off accurately. Third, by reducing it to "one bad decision by KJU or Trump" you exaggerate the agency of those individuals. If war breaks out, it won't be because of Trump waking up with a headache. If KJU makes a first strike, all hell will rain down on NK so that simply will not happen.
- burnte 9y agoI'm so glad to see someone else looking at this from a practical engineering standpoint. They've really had a handful of successful distance launches, none of which went much more than 2200 miles which is 50% of the way to hitting the US west coast (and I mean the COAST, not inland). Even then we have no idea how accurate they were since we don't know what their programmed target was. They've had far more failures than successes, and that demonstrates they have incredibly low reliability figures. Let's also remember that there's still no real evidence they were behind the Sony hack. I'm all for stopping NK from causing trouble and helping their people, but we're hardly at risk in the US mainland. What we really need to worry about is them striking SK or Japan, because that they can do reliably and inflict a lot of damage not just to those nations, but the world economy and stability.