North Korea has redeployed some of its missiles to the country’s eastern coast, a provocation and implicit warning that it just might carry through on some of its recent threats.
New ICBM models aren’t like iPhones; you don’t just take them out of the box and expect them to function properly. They have to be rigorously, painstakingly tested. Markus Schiller, an expert in the North Korean military, told Global Security Newswire that it was “totally impossible” for the KN-08 to be operational without tests. Even countries that have successfully built and launched ICMBs before, which North Korea has not, wouldn’t expect a new model to work perfectly on the first try. The KN-08 was just unveiled last April in a military parade in Pyongyang and has never been test-launched. Analysts aren’t even sure that it’s real.
The most bullish analysis of the KN-08′s potential threat this week, published in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, speculated that North Korea had only moved them to the coast so that, in the event of a test launch, they would be less likely to fall onto North Korean soil.![9873C2E2-67C6-4ECD-BAAA-2147433219AA_mw1024_n_s[1]](https://i0.wp.com/blog.mariostylianou.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/9873C2E2-67C6-4ECD-BAAA-2147433219AA_mw1024_n_s1.jpg)
