President Trump interrupted his own White House press conference today to respond to reports that North Korea had delivered on its promise of yet another ballistic missile test.
Moments after the launch was confirmed, Trump remarked pithily, “I will only tell you that we will take care of it.”
We have no doubt he’ll back that up with decisive action, so this could be a very interesting week.
The missile is reportedly the longest duration launch to-date for Kim Jung Il’s crazed regime with a flight time of almost an hour with an estimated range that easily could reach Washington, DC.
Its vertical trajectory sent it splashing down into the Sea of Japan, just west of the Japanese coast, which has Prime Minister Abe, shall we say, a tad nervous and calling for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council.
We’re thinking the time for diplomacy and sanctions has come to an end…mainly because they’re not working.
Clearly.
Here’s more from The Guardian…
North Korea has conducted a night test of a long-range ballistic missile which landed off the coast of Japan, triggering a South Korea test-launch in response and bringing a return to high tension to the region after a lull of more than two months.
The Pentagon issued a statement saying that the weapon tested was an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Initial reports from Seoul suggested that it came from a mobile launcher, and was fired at about 3am local time.
The missile was reported to have flown for 50 minutes, on a very high trajectory reaching 4,500 km above the earth (more than ten times higher than the orbit of Nasa’s International Space Station) before coming down nearly 1,000 km from the launch site off the west coast of Japan.
This would make it the most powerful of the three ICBM’s North Korea has tested so far.
Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, condemned the missile launch as a “violent act” that “can never be tolerated” and called for an emergency meeting of the UN security council.
