It’s very doubtfully an accident that North Korea decided to test-fire an ICBM on the day America celebrates its independence.
Kim Jong-Un bragged that the successful launch was a ‘glistening miracle’ as it flew nearly 600 miles before ultimately landing in the Sea of Japan.
Japanese defense officials escalated defense systems immediately while American forces went on alert.
The range of the missile, according to experts, means N. Korea could now be capable of hitting Alaska with a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile within months, if not weeks.
This ups the ante for a possible preemptive response from the Pentagon to prevent a possible attack on the U.S. or its allies in the North Pacific.
Here’s more from Daily Mail…
North Korea on Tuesday said it had successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), prompting US experts to say the device could reach Alaska.
The launch, which came as the United States prepared to mark its Independence Day, triggered a Twitter outburst from President Donald Trump who urged China to ‘put a heavy move’ on North Korea to ‘end this nonsense once and for all’.
The North has long sought to build a rocket capable of delivering an atomic warhead to the continental United States – something that Trump has vowed ‘won’t happen’, and launch marks a new phase in the country’s decades-long weapons program.
In an announcement of the missile test, North Korean officials called the launch, which leader Kim Jong-un supervised, a ‘glistening miracle’.
The missile launch prompted control specialist Jeffrey Lewis to respond on Twitter: ‘That’s it. It’s an ICBM. An ICBM that can hit Anchorage not San Francisco, but still.’
David Wright, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote on the organisation’s allthingsnuclear blog that the available figures implied the missile ‘could reach a maximum range of roughly 6,700 km on a standard trajectory’.
‘That range would not be enough to reach the lower 48 states or the large islands of Hawaii, but would allow it to reach all of Alaska.’
The ‘landmark’ test of a Hwasong-14 missile was overseen by Kim, an emotional female announcer said on state Korean Central Television.
It reached an altitude of 1741 miles (2,802 kilometres) and flew 580 miles (933 kilometres) for 39 minutes, she added.
