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Last week, US defense secretary Chuck Hagel announced something superficially alarming: Due to the recent tough talk coming out of Pyongyang, the Pentagon has announced a nearly $1 billion project to improve America’s defenses against a potential nuclear attack launched by North Korea. The boost in mainland missile defense will increase the number of ground-based interceptors in California and Alaska to 44 from 30 over the next four years. Part of this plan will involve resurrecting a missile field at Fort Greely, Alaska. “We will be able to add protection against missiles from Iran sooner while also proving protection against the threat from North Korea,” Hagel said during Friday’s Pentagon briefing.
The move comes on the heels of the North Korean government amping up its threats against the US: Along with conducting a third (suspected) nuclear test in seven years and declaring an end to the armistice with South Korea, the regime threatened to nuke American soil amid new UN sanctions. “The White House has been captured in the view of our long-range missile, and the capital of war is within the range of our atomic bomb,” or so goes the narration in a propaganda video post to the North Korean government’s YouTube page on Monday. The video includes a poorly produced animated sequence of the White House and Capitol dome exploding.
Here’s what’s crazy about all this: The Pentagon is spending $1 billion on a gesture. Virtually no one in the US government actually believes that North Korea (or Iran, for that matter) is close to having the ability to hit any part of the United States with nuclear missiles. It is also unclear how close North Korea is to being able to convert their tested nuclear devices to function as warheads. (Click here to get an idea of the state of the supposed North Korean missile threat just last year.)
Mother Jones
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