North Korea’s neighbors are freaking out about its latest move – Wednesday’s firing of a missile into Japanese waters.
In a bid to assert what it feels is its right to threaten everyone in the region, Pyongyang on Wednesday tested a missile by firing it into Japanese waters, causing Japan to call the act “unforgivable.” The boy king Kim Jong-un wanted mainly to send a message that no one is going to tell the North what to do, and that the government will continue to pursue its weapons program, which includes its nuclear program.
In the past, the North has used its nuclear program as a bargaining tool, in order to get aid and other free goodies from the South and the U.S. — and the North’s propaganda machine told its people those two countries were paying tribute to the world’s richest and most powerful nation. But that has changed. Pyongyang watched closely how the U.S. toppled governments in Libya and Iraq over the last decade. North Korea watched as former Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi was beaten and killed by a local militia after being overthrown, and how his body was kept in a freezer at a local market for several days for people from across the country to come and view. The North also watched as Saddam Hussein was hunted down and executed after the U.S. invasion. Kim Jong-un doesnt want that to be him, so he’s now using his nukes to protect his regime from being overthrown.
But nukes are no good unless there’s a way to deliver them, and the North is now testing missiles that could potentially carry a nuclear warhead and blast cities like Osaka, Tokyo, Yokohama and Seoul back to the stone age. North Korea thinks threatening U.S. allies with destruction is the best insurance policy against the U.S. overthrowing it.
The North has six different kinds of missiles, four of them being untested, but two being tested and capable of being delivered.
David Wright, co-director at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, said North Korea’s weapons could do significant damage to Japan’s and South Korea’s cities, and that the North’s Scud missiles could reach all of South Korea and its Nodong missiles could reach all of Japan.
Not much is known about the country’s nuclear weapons, but its tests so far indicate yields of less than 10 kilotons. That’s a bit smaller than the nuclear bombs that reduced Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble, but could still do a lot of damage to a city, he told Borderless News Online.
Moreover, Osaka, Yokohama and Tokyo in Japan and Seoul in South Korea – and the surrounding metro areas – have a combined population of over 100 million. And people are packed in tightly in those cities, with Seoul’s metro population comprising half the nation’s 50 million-strong population. The bulk of the nation’s economy is disproportionately concentrated in Seoul, the nation’s political, financial and cultural capital. North Korea could potentially take out entire neighborhoods in Seoul. That could kill scores of people and would cause the stock market to take a nose dive and put the economy in freefall.
Wright said for a large target like a city, the missile delivering a nuclear warhead would not need to be very accurate. While North Korea has exploded nuclear devices in its tests, it’s not known if the country has a nuclear warhead it could mount on a missile to deliver, he said.
Pyongyang may also have the ability to deliver chemical or biological weapons from missiles. While those could be deadly, their effects are much more uncertain since they depend on wind patterns, Wright said, but added they would create terror.
The country also has scud missiles. As with the Iraqi attacks on Israel using conventional high explosive warheads on Scud missiles during the 1991 Gulf War, scuds are unlikely to cause a lot of deaths. The effects of individual explosions are much smaller, and inaccuracy of the missiles can keep them from detonating in densely populated areas, he said.
Any attack by the North would spark a quick counter strike from the South.
South Korea has short-range missiles and cruise missiles, but does not have nuclear weapons. But it has a strong defense alliance with the U.S., which stations Patriot anti-missile systems in South Korea, which are intended to intercept missiles up to about 1000 km in range, said Wright.
But no one knows how well that would work to stop incoming warheads. The system has been improved since its use in the 1991 Gulf War, but in that case it did not work nearly as well against a real attack as it did in tests, Wright said.
The same can be said for THAAD – a missile defense system designed to shoot down missiles in the air. Seoul recently announced it would deploy the system. But no one knows what its capability would be against a real attack. THAAD is also earlier in the development and testing process than Patriot, Wright said.
“The bottom line is that you cannot count on these, or any, missile defense systems to work well enough to protect you from a nuclear attack by multiple missiles,” he said.
Japan also has Patriot batteries, and has been developing with the U.S. the ship-based Aegis missile defense system. This system has worked well in tests, but has not been tested against a real-world threat.
As a result, its capability is also not known, he said.
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