Re: Capabilities
NASA, the Russians and SpaceX regularly blow up their rockets. And that's in cases where they've planned the launch several years in advance and are using rockets from a proper production line. With Q&A, and no parts built by slave labour.
NASA's annual budget is bigger than North Korea's total GDP by the way...
As the joke goes, it's not rocket science that's hard. It's rocket engineering.
Now you need to add in warhead engineering too. And enough space engineering to get your warhead or EMP to target. Britain's Chevaline programme cost £5 billion. In 1970s money. And that didn't even get MIRVs, it was to design star-trackers and some decoys to get through Moscow's ABM defences.
Now admittedly a lot of these costs don't equate, because North Korea won't be paying its top scientists top money. They'll just be telling them what to do. But to do this really complex stuff takes a large chain of scientific and engineering capabilities. And every time you bodge something to get round a problem, that's another bodge that might go wrong when you launch.
This doesn't mean the Norks aren't a threat. But it's not one to be over-stated, given how crappy their whole infrastructure and capabilities are.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
