Persistent North Korea

North Korea is steadfast in its determination to keep testing long-range missiles:

SEOUL, South Korea – A defiant North Korea on Thursday threatened to test-fire more missiles and warned of even stronger action if opponents of the tests put pressure on the country, amid signs of further activity at the reclusive regime’s launch sites.

The further show of bravado by Pyongyang came amid intense diplomatic jockeying by the United States and its allies to prod the U.N. Security Council to take stern action against the North’s seven missile tests on Wednesday.

The North Korean Foreign Ministry, in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, insisted that the communist state had the right to missile tests and argued the weapons were needed for defense.

I think too much is being made of North Korea’s recent apparently-failed test of a long-range missile and the nature of the actuals threats that North Korea poses.

Don’t discount their development program. The picture above is the highly-publicized failure of the first-ever attempt by the U. S. to launch a satellite back in the 1950’s. Something like half of all the Vanguard launches were failures. In our own missile development program we had hundreds or thousands of failures.

Failures aren’t a bad thing. They’re part of engineering. You fail and learn and fail again and learn some and, eventually, you succeed.

So don’t think of the North Koreans as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight”. Think of their program as being on the steep side of the learning curve.

But I think that the characterizations of the actual threat are exaggerated, too. Some of the analysts rather clearly don’t know how to convert from kilometers to miles. What do they teach in school these days?

North Korea doesn’t have a vehicle that can reach the continental United States and they don’t a payload (like a nuclear warhead) they could put in such a vehicle that would do catastrophic damage. The timeline of two tests in, what, eight years is not enormously threatening. They don’t have the capability to mass-produce the devices for widespread distribution and sale—what we’re seeing now are essentially handcrafted.

But they are testing and they are learning and they are persistent. They aren’t conforming to the protocols that the members of the long-range missile testing club use for exchanging information about their tests. And they have a history of selling what they produce to anybody with money and collaborating with other rogue operations (A. Q. Khan in Pakistan).

We should take the development seriously and push for a serious international reaction, particularly from North Korea’s main patron, China. Other than that we shouldn’t panic. My recommendation: “Put your trust in God; but mind to keep your powder dry!”

I’m still collecting explanations for the North Koreans’ behavior. Here’s the round-up so far:

• The consensus view seems to be that it’s an attention-getting device.
• I’ve read suggestions that they’re getting rid of inventories because they’re concerned about a U. S. or even world response.
• Some suggest that they’re just incompetent or crazy.
• My own view is that they’re simultaneously testing their own capabilities, gathering information on U. S. anti-missile capabilities, and developing means of eluding them.  UPDATE:  Austin Bay’s recent post puts some weight behind this alternative.
• I don’t think that we should discount the idea that these actions are for internal consumption.
• Expanding on the previous point, these tests may be an act of fealty on the part of the North Korean rocket scientists.
• It may have been a means of forcing the U. S.’s hand. Duck of Minerva notes that, regardless of intent, that’s the likely result of the missile-firing.
• It’s a merchandising ploy. North Korea’s only real export is weaponry. Pursuit of working ICBM’s and nuclear weapons will expand their markets.
• They’re attempting to reduce expectations on their long-range program by firing lots of missiles in a cluster.
• By repeated missile launches they’re legitimizing their program.
• They’re stirring the pot; their actions provoke reactions from Japan, the United States, and China, in particular.

UPDATE: Let’s not forget Japan and the troops we have stationed in Okinawa. They’re under threat from the weapons that North Korea already has. Isn’t that where some Democrats want to station the “over the horizon” force removed from Iraq?