Our experts weigh in on security issues with U.S. national missile defense and nuclear weapons around the world.
October 13, 2017 11:26 PM EDT
In an October 11 interview on Fox News, President Trump claimed:
We have missiles that can knock out a missile in the air 97 percent of the time. If you send two of them, they are going to get knocked down.
This is not true. At least not in any relevant way. Read more >
September 14, 2017 10:25 PM EDT
North Korea conducted another missile test at 6:30 am September 15 Korean time (early evening on September 14 in the US). Like the August 28 test, this test appears to have been a Hwasong-12 missile launched from a site near the Pyongyang airport. The missile followed a standard trajectory—rather than the highly lofted trajectories North Korea used earlier this year—and it flew over part of the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido (Fig. 1). Read more >
August 29, 2017 12:27 PM EDT
Yesterday’s missile launch by North Korea is reported to have been launched from a site near the capitol city of Pyongyang (Sunan) and landed 2,700 kilometers (km) (1,700 miles) to the east after flying over part of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. The missile reportedly flew to a maximum altitude of about 550 km (340 miles), reaching Hokkaido after about eight minutes of flight and splashing down after 14 to 15 minutes. Read more >
July 28, 2017 2:19 PM EDT
Based on current information, today’s missile test by North Korea could easily reach the US West Coast, and a number of major US cities. Read more >
July 7, 2017 6:00 AM EDT
In a previous post, I estimated what North Korea could have learned from its May 14 Hwasong-12 missile test that is relevant to developing a reentry vehicle (RV) for a longer range missile.
I’ve updated the numbers in that post for the July 4 missile test (Table 1). In particular, I compare several measures of the heating experienced by the RV on the July 4 test to what would be experienced by the same RV on a 10,000 km-range missile on a standard trajectory (MET). Read more >
