Many Western analysts greeted North Korea’s failure to put a satellite into orbit early this month with scorn, with one joke complimenting the dictator for a successful launch into the deep sea.
“Pacific plankton will forever live in fear of the mighty reach of Kim Jong Il,” one analyst wrote, “now that millions have perished in one mighty splash.”
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This article highlights some differing views (and the reasons for them) of the relative success of the most recent N. Korean missile launch.
Engineers tend to inhabit the middle ground, saying that failures teach more than successes and that the North Koreans are slowly — albeit very slowly — learning ... More »
Neither the arguments nor the facts have changed much since RR first proposed the anti missle program. It is good to revisit since it has gone forward despite its abject failure to produce.
1. In the first gulf war our patriots failed to destroy even one warhead, while they did strike 90 % of the targets which were as big as a bus and flying low and slow compared to an ICBM. In the spirit of full disclosure, when I penned an editorial on this subject in the 1980s, we recieved more mail than all but two editorials that year, but on farther review the majority was from non subscribers. In our own targeting of weapons, it was not uncommpn to target high value ... More »
The article gives a pretty balanced viewpoint for a general public audience. It omits some basic points. Suitcase nukes could easily arrive by ship or cruise missile, for which missile defense would be useless. Missile offense tricks can easily and cheaply defeat expensive defensive missiles. The elephant in the closet is whether the US secretly wants to enhance missile defense to try to defeat sophisticated systems such as Russia. It is a fools mission, but could reignite arms races.
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