History Proves North Korea’s Ballistic Missiles Are Very Hard to Hit

Robert Beckhusen

Security, Asia

It seems Kim has studied some history. 

Both of these following statements are true.

(1) Attempts to encourage North Korea to abandon its nuclear program through diplomacy have failed and, chances are, will continue to fail. (2) Were the United States to strike North Korea, the reclusive regime has ways to retaliate which America and its allies cannot easily counter.

The U.S. military is most worried about a North Korean nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, with the range to reach the U.S. homeland. If North Korea has not achieved this technical feat already by miniaturizing and “mating” a warhead to a reliable missile, then it’s quite possible it will do so by the end of the decade.

“There is a real possibility that North Korea will be able to hit the U.S. with a nuclear-armed missile by the end of the first Trump term,” deputy White House national security advisor K.T. McFarland told the Financial Times.

McFarland noted that a U.S. strike targeting “launch facilities, underground nuclear sites, artillery and rocket response forces and regime leadership targets may be the only option left on the table.”

McFarland did not explicitly say the White House is treating a strike as the only option. But the White House is right to be skeptical that diplomacy with North Korea, an ultra-nationalist regime which maintains power through a “military-first” ideology, will encourage Pyongyang to moderate or abandon its goals.

But striking North Korea’s rocket response forces — which could rain ballistic missiles onto South Korea — is a tactic with a poor track record.

North Korea is mountainous, and missile launchers are not difficult to camouflage and hide from aerial spotters, who often must rely on grainy imagery to see below. North Korea has also studied previous U.S. ballistic missile hunts and improved its own tactics.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. and British commandos operating in small teams scoured western Iraq — with coalition warplanes flying above — for Saddam Hussein’s Scud arsenal. While U.S. officials at the time described the hunt as highly effective, post-war Pentagon research found that few if any ballistic missile launchers were successfully destroyed.

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