North Korea Just Openly Tested Its First ICBM Since 2017 and It’s a Monster
What happened to non-proliferation? Thanks to the march of technology and world tensions, we never acted seriously to stop a nation from having them, let alone taking them away after the fact.
Publicly we did not worry when fellow allied powers made the bomb. Especially in the cold war. But here we are now. A tiny little hostile dictatorship has the bomb, and is about to or has demonstrated the ability to land it right here in the USA. What have we done? Not enough. Do I mean us, the USA? No, not really. I mean the world at large.
Do we have any right to pre-empt North Korea? Does Israel have the right to pre-empt Iran? Pakistan and India? Where does it start and end? I make no claim to having the answers. Yet civilizations’ existence depends upon these things not ever being used again.
Whatever the case, the Hwasongpho-17 follows a string of North Korean tests involving previously unseen hypersonic, ballistic, and cruise missiles of various types since last fall. The test of this particular weapon is clearly intended to signal the country’s growing strategic deterrence capabilities, including challenging any remaining doubts about its ability to directly threaten the United States.