South Korea's military says North Korea has fired a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile toward the sea.

North Korea fired a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile toward the sea on Sunday, South Korea’s military said, two months after the North claimed to have tested engines for a new harder-to-detect missile capable of striking distant U.S. targets in the region.

The launch was the North’s first this year. Experts say North Korea could ramp up its provocative missile tests as a way to influence the results of South Korea’s parliamentary elections in April and the U.S. presidential election in November.

  • XhieronEnglish
    0•11 months ago

    So you’re suggesting that North Korea is demonstrating its ballistic missiles solely in order to deter the United States from unilaterally launching an unprovoked surprise nuclear strike against North Korea. …

    Okay.

    Let’s talk about this, I guess.

    In the universe in which the US launches an unprovoked surprise nuclear attack against North Korea, I’d like to think we could all agree that the rest of the world, including other nuclear powers, would be united in retaliating, NK ballistic missiles or not. Sure, it’s not impossible that the US government could become irrational, but that’s I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that nuclear deterrence is about more than that.

    Even allowing ad arguendo a Hiroshima-like escalation scenario, we don’t actually need the US’s nuclear arsenal to do that (see: Tokyo and Berlin bombing campaigns). That is to say–to the extent that NK being a nuclear power might play in an actual deterrence scenario, it’s redundant. In all other scenarios, we’re not using 1945 military doctrine anyway.