Friday, July 03, 2009

Will They or Won't They?

Our new column for Examiner.com looks at the looming showdown between the U.S. and North Korea. By some accounts, Pyongyang is preparing to launch another Tapeodong-2 long-range missile, apparently in the direction of Hawaii. In response, the Obama Administration has positioned additional missile defenses around the islands, and suggested that we are prepared to shoot down the TD-2.

But there are limits on how far we're willing to go in dealing with that threat. As we note in the article, maybe the real issue isn't whether North Korea will launch the missile, but rather, does the U.S. have the political will to shoot it down.

2 comments:

Ed Rasimus said...

The Great Karnac holds the envelope to his forehead and says..."the answer is no, we don't have the political will. In fact we don't even have the ability to make a decision until the media covers the event, the pollsters have checked the temperature of the electorate, and the politically-correct military leadership has analyzed the data from the missile telemetry software."

What will happen is they will cross their fingers in Washington and hope the Taepodong-2 blows up in flight, falls well short of any major land mass, or hits Molokai instead of Hilo. Then they will congratulate themselves on their restraint, reassure us that there was no threat and send a request for a strong message from the UN to caution Kim.

jms said...

Alternately, is the U.S. willing to give our enemies a good look at our missile defense system for free. That missile could be carrying anything, including radar receivers, cameras, etc with a radio link back home. It could have a prototype anti-ABM defense that we would be letting them test out for free. There are good arguments for just letting the thing fly and trying to recover it, unless we think it's actually carrying a nuke.