North Korea Missile Test Could Put Denver in Range Test ramps up the stakes for U.S. President Donald Trump, who has vowed to rein in North Korea’s arms program By Jonathan Cheng and Dion Nissenbaum
https://www.wsj.com/articles/north-korea-fires-single-missile-into-waters-between-korea-and-japan-1501258064
SEOUL—North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile Friday that experts said put the continental U.S. firmly in range of a strike, underscoring Pyongyang’s rapid advance in technology and intensifying a standoff with Washington.
The launch emanated from North Korea’s mountainous interior, flying for more than 45 minutes before landing in the waters between Japan and the Korean Peninsula, U.S., South Korean and Japanese officials said.
Hours after the North Korea missile launch, the U.S. and South Korea carried out a live fire exercise by launching missiles into the territorial waters off South Korea’s East Coast, according to the U.S. military.
Lt. Gen. Thomas Vandal, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army in South Korea, said that the U.S. military is “ready to fight tonight, will deter North Korean provocation and if necessary defend the Republic of Korea,” using the formal name for South Korea.
North Korea’s action comes just three weeks after it surprised the world with its first ever intercontinental ballistic missile test.
But Friday’s missile was a more advanced ICBM than the one fired earlier this month, flying 620 miles and reaching a maximum altitude of 2,300 miles—far more than the July 4 missile’s 1,740 miles, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. North Korea, in a separate media report hours later, released numbers in line with those estimates.
The significantly higher altitude of Friday’s missile suggests that it could have flown much farther than the last one.
The new missile would be able to fly more than 6,400 miles if fired at a standard trajectory, David Wright, a physicist and co-director of the Global Security Program at the Union Concerned Scientists, wrote in an analysis on Friday. That would put Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago within range.
In a report published Saturday morning by the official state mouthpiece, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the ICBM test showed Pyongyang could make a “surprise launch of ICBM in any region and place any time, and clearly proved that the whole U.S. mainland is in the firing range of the DPRK missiles.” He used the acronym for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. CONTINUE AT SITE
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