Odds Kim Jong Un launches that new ICBM before Jan 20?

Telegraph UK:

You can kick the can down the road, but when Kim Jong Un announces, as he did last Sunday, that “we have reached the final stage in preparations to test-launch an intercontinental ballistic rocket,” you are reaching the end of that road.

Since the early 1990s, we have offered every kind of inducement to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program. All failed miserably. Pyongyang managed to extort money, food, oil and commercial nuclear reactors in exchange. But it was all a swindle. North Korea was never going to give up its nukes because it sees them as the ultimate guarantee of regime survival.

This is true of many nations BTW. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of Pakistan said publicly when the idea of worldwide sanctions against Pakistan was broached to him (as AQ Khan was busy, busy, busy, creating both the means for a weapon, and the means to SELL those means as a business process), that he would see Pakistanis EATING GRASS before the nuclear weapons project was given up.

Today, the means are a little different than what would have been available then (one sided nuclear war by India to stop two sided nuclear war).

I am betting that the Nork’s are probably too stupid to realize that Trump’s tweet …

North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the U.S. It won’t happen!

Is something he means, but I am sure someone is so scared by this over there, by the thought Kim will chop them (and everyone they know and ever heard of), that they are pushing things right along.

All we have to do is station several Arleigh Burke Class DDG-51’s with new Aegis Radar and armed with SM-3’s, and SM-6’s and we can take out any launch as it passes from North Korea over the ocean.

DDG-70, Hopper firing SM-3 missile designed to kill ICBM’s in ascent phase

To make use of nukes on a worldwide scale BELIEVABLE you have to have a delivery system you can depend on, and tests you can learn from to make that possible.

We can see the launch site. We can see the preparations. We can be ready And if we think we cannot predict the launches, THAT’S WHY WE NEED THE BIG, MODERN NAVY, and we station patrols around the Sea of Japan, and Yellow Sea ready to respond in defense 24x7x365.

No one gets hurt. All long range missile tests are made into flying garbage. We get real practice.

WIN-WIN. Perfect for a Trump.

But until Jan 20, we won’t do anything.

Except a speech.

MAYBE.

From the tee on the 11th at Makalei or Kukio.