Secretary of Defense James Mattis said Friday he does not believe that North Korea’s current intercontinental ballistic missiles are capable of hitting the continental US.
At the time, Mattis noted that the launch showed that North Korea was working on a research and development program that could produce a missile capable of hitting “everywhere in the world” and reflected “a continued effort to build a threat — a ballistic missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace and certainly, the United States.”
His assessment Friday was in line with technical analysts who say that North Korea’s November launch didn’t actually demonstrate an ability to hit the US or that it is making advances on the technical challenges required for a successful, operational ICBM.
“I’m highly suspicious about the capability of the Hwasong-15,” retired Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and expert in aerospace and missile defense, said in an email.
The red flag for O’Reilly and other missile experts is that the North Koreans keep shooting the missile almost straight up, and not in the parabolic arc of a standard missile trajectory, which is harder to achieve.
“Super-large heavy warhead”
Another question comes from the fact that it’s impossible to tell the missile’s true range without knowing the weight of the payload — which North Korea claimed was a “super-large heavy warhead.
