The country said the as-yet-unnamed weapon was fired from the same submarine from which it tested its first SLBM, the Pukguksong-1, in August A combination of pictures shows a new submarine-launched ballistic missile during a test in this undated photo released Wednesday. Some observers had expected the latest test to involve a new submarine shown off in that is believed to be capable of launching multiple SLBMs. That submarine could potentially give the North a second-strike capability in the event of an attack on the country.
Still, the smaller SLBM could suggest that Pyongyang is moving closer to fielding an operational ballistic missile submarine, since the new weapon would allow for more missiles to be deployed on the vessel.
In recent weeks, North Korea has tested a range of increasingly powerful new weapons systems. These have included a long-range cruise missile believed to be capable of delivering a nuclear bomb to Japan, as well as a train-launched weapon and what the North said was a hypersonic gliding vehicle. On Tuesday, the U. Kim, however, has condemned the U. The reason behind the discrepancy was unclear. A woman walks past a television showing a news broadcast with file footage of a North Korean missile test, at a railway station in Seoul on Tuesday.
The Pentagon already assumes that its airbases in and around South Korea would be among the first places Kim tried to hit with chemical weapons like sarin.
But they worry an attack could nevertheless make it significantly harder for the US to launch air raids against the North by causing panic and chaos on the bases that house the American warplanes, bombers, and troops. Retired Air Force Lt. Washington would also try to kill senior North Korean military commanders and government officials, including Kim.
They try to game out all the various ways North Korea could hit the facilities, and to prepare accordingly. The Pentagon has a sizable military presence in neighboring Japan, and the island of Guam is a US territory that is home to more than , American citizens.
Andrew Weber, formerly the assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, told me that the US and South Korea would also need to be prepared for Kim to use biological weapons against both military and civilian targets. They are some of the most frightening substances on earth, and Weber expects some of them to be used against South Korean ports, airfields, and cities as a way of killing large numbers of civilians and troops while causing terror on a nationwide scale.
North Korea could theoretically fire missiles with payloads of anthrax or other biological weapons into South Korea, or use drones to disperse the lethal substances from the air. The researchers wrote that Kim could also have some of his citizens secretly bring the weapons into the South:.
North Korea has , special forces; even a handful of those special forces armed with BW would be enough to devastate South Korea.
What is alarming about human vectors is that they do not need sophisticated training or technology to spread BW amongst the targets, and they are difficult to detect in advance of an attack.
It is theoretically possible that North Korean sleeper agents disguised as cleaning and disinfection personnel could disperse BW agents with backpack sprayers. Another possibility is that North Korean agents will introduce BW into water supplies for major metropolitan areas.
In , Weber helped design a war game centered on a simulated North Korean biological weapons attack on the South. The exercise, Able Response , brought together hundreds of military and civilian officials from the US and South Korea. The goals were to figure out the best ways to detect an attack, identify what substance had been used, limit the spread of the virus, and then rush vaccines and other medical care to the infected to save as many lives as possible.
US bases in South Korea received new environmental surveillance systems designed to quickly detect the presence of a biological agent.
Still, Weber said his main takeaway was the near impossibility of preventing biological weapons from killing an astonishing number of people. In some cases, it was significantly higher because the infection spread to Japan or other nearby countries.
North Korea is thought to have about 50 nukes. The US, by contrast, has an astonishing 6, nuclear weapons surpassed only by Russia, which has an estimated 7, weapons. Trump — or one of his successors — could respond to a North Korean nuclear strike by destroying every major North Korean city in a matter of hours. Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country.
And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came. Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end.
And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order. He remembers that the walls were covered with graffiti praising Kim. He knows that any US and South Korean strike would be designed to destroy or capture his nuclear weapons.
In the s, the Soviet Union was much stronger militarily than Germany, France, or the other countries of Western Europe. The US had formally committed to protecting those nations from a Soviet invasion, and Bennett told me that American military planners were prepared to use small-scale tactical nuclear weapons against the advancing Russian troops to stop the assault.
That entire calculus began to change once the Soviet Union developed long-range nuclear missiles capable of reaching the continental US. European leaders openly wondered how far Washington would be willing to go to protect their countries from the Soviet Union given the new risks to the American homeland.
If the US were no longer willing to defend Seoul, then South Korea — which has no nuclear weapons of its own — would be a lot easier to invade and defeat. But how do you break up that alliance?
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