After North Korea launched an…
After North Korea launched an intermediate ballistic missile into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone this week, some analysts warned that North Korea already has the capability to make a nuclear warhead missile hit Alaska, but one expert warns that threat assessment is “outdated.”
Bruce Klingner, a senior research fellow at Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D. C., told TheBlaze last week that there is evidence to suggest that North Korea is currently able to strike not only Alaska with a nuclear warhead, but the U. S. West Coast, and beyond.
Klingner said that while North Korea’s launch on Tuesday involved an intermediate range missile, capable of reaching Alaska or Hawaii, the country has also experimented with longer range missiles, called intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs.
These long range missiles, Klingner said, could potentially reach as far as New York City, Miami and Washington, D. C.
Klingner said that when North Korea launched a rocket into space in December 2012, which later fell into the ocean, the South Korean Navy retrieved the pieces of the satellite. Klingner said that South Korean officials determined the rocket was able to travel 10,000 kilometers.
“That’s down to Missouri. That’s 40 percent of the continental U. S. That’s 120 million Americans, ” Klingner pointed out.
Then, in February 2017, North Korea launched another rocket into orbit. Again, the rocket fell into the ocean, and the South Korean Navy fetched the pieces to determine just how much advancement North Korea had achieved.
“People now think it’s a 13,000-kilometer range, which is all the way down to Miami, ” Klingner told TheBlaze.
But North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and his regime aren’ t stopping there, according to the Heritage Foundation expert. Klingner said that North Korea is in the process of developing a road mobile rocket engine that could reach targets much farther away than the U.
