By Donald Kirk
So much is said and written about North Korea's missile tests that it is possible to forget they are hardly the most dangerous threats posed by flying "projectiles."
That's not to minimize their importance, or to side with Donald Trump when he dismisses them as short-range, not in violation of anything, while praising Kim Jong-un for the love letter he got from him the same day Kim ordered another set of tests.
There are two points here. The first is, we have a lot more to fear from Russia's burgeoning missile ambitions, and China's too, than from North Korean missiles. Second, North Korea is basically throwing its direly needed resources away on nukes and missiles, whatever the range, when there's no way Kim is about to have them affixed with warheads and fired for real.
Saving that second point for later, the Russian danger has just increased with Trump's decision to jettison the INF treaty. Banning Russia and the U.S. from making land-based missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was?reached by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 31 years ago. Trump's innermost advisers, notably John Bolton, convinced him the Russians had been violating the treaty all along, making new missiles while making a show of destroying old ones, while the Chinese, not bound by anything, were making many more of them.
With the INF relegated this month to the ash heap of history, everyone's going to be making more missiles than ever. The U.S. is looking around for places to base them in Asia while the Russians add to the ones they've got from the Russian Far East, so close to Alaska, to the borders of the eastern European countries that Moscow dominated as "satellites" until the collapse of the Soviet Union soon after the INF treaty took effect.
Fledgling U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper raised the topic of mini-bases for missiles that the U.S. wants to install overseas during his recent talks in Korea, Japan and Mongolia. He intimated nothing in public about post-INF needs, however, while bracing up the American alliances with Japan and South Korea, urging "trilateral cooperation" as Tokyo and Seoul were blasting one another in a dispute that Washington hates and Pyongyang loves.
The reason for Esper's silence on planting more U.S. missiles in the region is that he knows the last thing anyone wants in this corner of the world is to antagonize China and Russia with an enhanced missile shield that would totally upset the leaders of both these giant powers.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has already punished South Korea for letting the Americans plant the high-altitude counter-missile system known as THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense), way south of Seoul. He's shut down South Korean firms in China and held back droves of free-spending Chinese tourists that once flooded duty-free shops in Korea. As for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, he said the day the INF was finished that Russia would have to rev up its missile production if the U.S. was making more of them too.
Russia's ongoing program was exposed when an explosion ripped apart a small reactor at a Russian cruise missile test site off its northwestern coast. Five Russian nuclear scientists and two others were killed while radiation levels in the area doubled. Despite the setback, Russia is sure to go right ahead making those missiles. Oh, and the Russians are reportedly working on a missile that could be fired from an underwater drone ― a vessel with no people on board that could edge up to coastal targets anywhere.
Others are getting into the act. Japan reportedly has a "glide bomb" from which it should be possible to fire a missile once it gets fairly near its target. The rationale for that device is for defense of distant territories, from the huge northern island of Hokkaido, within eyesight of small Russian islands that the Japanese say are rightfully theirs, to the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, tenaciously held by Japan but claimed by China, which calls them Diaoyu.
The Japanese, of course, already have Aegis missiles on destroyers and Patriot missiles on land, all for the purpose of intercepting North Korean missiles, and are acquiring cruise missiles capable of first strikes on North Korean targets.
All of which means that Kim Jong-un's missile tests, while grabbing headlines, are not the most frightening of missile threats.?If Kim were so foolhardy as to launch a weaponized missile, Japan's hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would have no better excuse for revising his country's "no war" constitution, dating from the U.S. occupation. As for Trump, he would have trouble convincing the Pentagon that Kim still loved him.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has been covering war and peace in Asia for decades.
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That's not to minimize their importance, or to side with Donald Trump when he dismisses them as short-range, not in violation of anything, while praising Kim Jong-un for the love letter he got from him the same day Kim ordered another set of tests.
There are two points here. The first is, we have a lot more to fear from Russia's burgeoning missile ambitions, and China's too, than from North Korean missiles. Second, North Korea is basically throwing its direly needed resources away on nukes and missiles, whatever the range, when there's no way Kim is about to have them affixed with warheads and fired for real.
Saving that second point for later, the Russian danger has just increased with Trump's decision to jettison the INF treaty. Banning Russia and the U.S. from making land-based missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty was?reached by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 31 years ago. Trump's innermost advisers, notably John Bolton, convinced him the Russians had been violating the treaty all along, making new missiles while making a show of destroying old ones, while the Chinese, not bound by anything, were making many more of them.
With the INF relegated this month to the ash heap of history, everyone's going to be making more missiles than ever. The U.S. is looking around for places to base them in Asia while the Russians add to the ones they've got from the Russian Far East, so close to Alaska, to the borders of the eastern European countries that Moscow dominated as "satellites" until the collapse of the Soviet Union soon after the INF treaty took effect.
Fledgling U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper raised the topic of mini-bases for missiles that the U.S. wants to install overseas during his recent talks in Korea, Japan and Mongolia. He intimated nothing in public about post-INF needs, however, while bracing up the American alliances with Japan and South Korea, urging "trilateral cooperation" as Tokyo and Seoul were blasting one another in a dispute that Washington hates and Pyongyang loves.
The reason for Esper's silence on planting more U.S. missiles in the region is that he knows the last thing anyone wants in this corner of the world is to antagonize China and Russia with an enhanced missile shield that would totally upset the leaders of both these giant powers.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has already punished South Korea for letting the Americans plant the high-altitude counter-missile system known as THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense), way south of Seoul. He's shut down South Korean firms in China and held back droves of free-spending Chinese tourists that once flooded duty-free shops in Korea. As for Russian leader Vladimir Putin, he said the day the INF was finished that Russia would have to rev up its missile production if the U.S. was making more of them too.
Russia's ongoing program was exposed when an explosion ripped apart a small reactor at a Russian cruise missile test site off its northwestern coast. Five Russian nuclear scientists and two others were killed while radiation levels in the area doubled. Despite the setback, Russia is sure to go right ahead making those missiles. Oh, and the Russians are reportedly working on a missile that could be fired from an underwater drone ― a vessel with no people on board that could edge up to coastal targets anywhere.
Others are getting into the act. Japan reportedly has a "glide bomb" from which it should be possible to fire a missile once it gets fairly near its target. The rationale for that device is for defense of distant territories, from the huge northern island of Hokkaido, within eyesight of small Russian islands that the Japanese say are rightfully theirs, to the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, tenaciously held by Japan but claimed by China, which calls them Diaoyu.
The Japanese, of course, already have Aegis missiles on destroyers and Patriot missiles on land, all for the purpose of intercepting North Korean missiles, and are acquiring cruise missiles capable of first strikes on North Korean targets.
All of which means that Kim Jong-un's missile tests, while grabbing headlines, are not the most frightening of missile threats.?If Kim were so foolhardy as to launch a weaponized missile, Japan's hawkish Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would have no better excuse for revising his country's "no war" constitution, dating from the U.S. occupation. As for Trump, he would have trouble convincing the Pentagon that Kim still loved him.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, has been covering war and peace in Asia for decades.
