Missile interceptors and you

North Korea has continued popping crazy pills at an astounding rate. Their latest move, it seems, will be to fire (or test-fire, as in, not at an enemy target) a medium-range missile or two from its east coast. This has everyone a little nervous, because if even if the thing flies perfectly--and they don't always work out that way--it could very well fly over or land near Japan.

A brief look at what the DPRK is bringing to the table: The Musudan ballistic missile.

Pointy? Check. Fins? Check.

With a range of a little over 2,100 miles, it could concievably hit all of Japan, bits of Russia, a scattering of U.S. island bases and of course China. (A Co-Worker of the Blog suggested hitting China would be North Korea's ultimate "look at us, we're so crazy and unpredictable!" card.) It can theoretically carry a 1,600-pound warhead. I say theoretically because it has not been successfully tested.

Meanwhile, South Korea, the United States and Japan have brought their own pointy-finned toys to the table. In Japan, you have the MIM-104F Patriot PAC-3 deployed around Tokyo.

It's in a box, but yes--pointy and finned.

These are the latest iteration of the Patriot air defense missile made famous--or infamous--in the first Gulf War. These days, they are lighter, faster, stronger and have a tougher job than their predecessors. The early Patriots were designed to destroy their targets by exploding nearby and spraying it with high-velocity fragments. The idea is that this structural damage would rip the target, also traveling at high speed, straight to pieces.

But there is a better way: hitting it directly. Until relatively recently, the idea of hitting a missile directly with another missile was too difficult an engineering challenge to pull off reliably--thus the blast-fragmentation warhead. But the PAC-3 is in fact designed to hit its target directly. It does this by combining high-quality radar data from ground stations with a radar receiver in its own nose (now conveniently empty of a large warhead). When it hits its target, the kinetic energy of two objects, each moving about five times the speed of sound, is enough to completely obliterate the incoming missile... and thus prevent its warhead from following a ballistic path and hitting something on the ground. To make sure the job is done, the PAC-3 also carries a small explosive charge.

Meanwhile, in Korea and Guam, you have the latest in missile-blowing-up technology, the THAAD, whose unwieldy acronym stands for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. It looks a little something like this:

Yep. Another box.

The THAAD is designed to actually destroy an incoming ballistic missile at the edges of the Earth's atmosphere, essentially before it has time to begin falling toward its target. This is a fantastically tricky task, and the actual interceptor is studded with reaction control jets that make it look like a freaky alien spaceship:

And that weird-looking box smashes into the warhead, again using kinetic energy to blow the enemy missile up real good.

And finally, both the U.S. and Japan have ships loaded with RIM-161--the boringly named Standard Missiles--that can actually blast satellites out of orbit.

Pointy again!

As the link above illustrates, these missiles, in combination with the U.S. Navy's Aegis radar system, are designed to hit incoming warheads well away from the target. This includes ICBMs, which thankfully North Korea has none of, but also shorter-range ballistic missiles. And like the THAAD and PAC-3, they are designed to directly hit their targets.

The exact ranges and capabilities of these systems are played relatively close to the vest. The Patriot's ground-based radar has a range of 65 or so miles. The THAAD and RIM-161 are harder to pin down, but as their targets are essentially extra-atmospheric, we're talking hundreds of miles, most likely.

What does this all mean? Well, essentially, it means that barring multiple failures--not impossible, but unlikely--if North Korea shoots a missile... and it works... and it's headed anywhere remotely dangerous... it will probably be shot down by one of the above systems. But in the meantime, let's hope for a sure thing: if North Korea doesn't test its missile, no one will get hurt.

Hiding (or not) in plain sight

So the French intelligence agency has been quite angry at the Internet the last few days. First, Wikipedia rebuffed their censorship of a wiki page about a radio installation that the DCRI said was classified. Then blogs around the world picked up the story, rightly mocking the French spies for trying to dismantle a page that had both been online for years and was constructed of, as far as anyone could tell, public information.

I'll join the party. Looky here!

Si elle ne peut pas vous voir, vous ne pouvez pas le voir.

But it's interesting to consider what the DCRI might be so upset about. The folks at Wikipedia, who are of course onboard with not breaking laws, offered to take down any specific content that the intelligence agency could show was classified or damaging. But the DCRI insisted that they take the entire page down.

Why is that? Well, if you think about it, they might have a good reason. If you take down the entire page, no one will ever know exactly what bits were so dangerous... and the secret is relatively safe. On the other hand, if you just excise the aforementioned dangerous bits, well, a cached version of the page will tell any spy with a mouse and a monitor exactly what the DCRI didn't want you to read.

Of course, like I said, because most--if not all--of the page is constructed from publicly available information, including a VIDEO INTERVIEW with the person who runs the station, it's tough to see where they're coming from. But then again, they're spies. So maybe that's the point.

Meanwhile, at Pax River...

Sure, North Korea seems to have gotten its hands on some top-quality crazy pills. Yes, U.S. employment figures are going through their annual spring swoon. And just across the road--if you live in Hong Kong, anyway--China is killing birds to head off what may or may not be another outbreak of deadly avian flu.

Stay tuned on that last point, by the way. If it ever does become an actual outbreak, expect to see a lot of scenes like this...

Note: in an actual Hong Kong emergency, the sign would be in Chinese, and it would be sterilized six times a day.

... in the 'Kong, and I'll tell you all about it in this space.

But anyway. This post isn't about those things. This post is pure fun, at least if you're an aviation dork like me. The F-35 program, dogged by budget overruns and technical setbacks, appears well on its way to producing one of the most impressive airplanes the world has ever seen. And what's better than a vertical landing video? A vertical landing video filmed with night vision equipment, of course.

She's a beaut, ain't she? So yes--there might be bigger stories out there to consider, but this is one that you don't have to think too hard about just enjoying.

Special delivery

North Korea has been doing a lot of saber-rattling lately. And saber dancing. And saber-waving. Lots of saber activities, actually, except for actual saber use.

That last one is a good thing, obviously. No one wants war on the Korean Peninsula. Although it would, without any doubt, end badly for the government in Pyongyang, even a few days of real warfare would create a huge death toll, including civilians in Seoul, just a hop, skip and an artillery shell away from the DMZ.

The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea can still issue threats, though. And oh, how they do issue them. It is getting to the point, as several commentators have noted, that they are running out of substantially different things to say. There's only so much crazy you can pump across the border before you're repeating yourself.

South Korea and its ally, the United States, have generally responded to these threats with the geopolitical equivalent of eye-rolling. But with the volume of caterwauling turned up lately, the U.S. made a fairly grand gesture this week: it flew B-2 bombers on a training mission over South Korea.

That's about 13,000 miles round trip, all to drop some inert practice bombs.

A long way to fly, and not even bi bim bop to show for it.

Will this give the hot-blooded pause in North Korea? Who knows. It's equally unclear whether even the hottest-blooded general (or whatever Kim Jong Un's title is these days) had plans to do any button pushing or trigger pulling in any event.

But the message South Korea and the U.S. are trying to deliver could not be clearer. This is a weapon system that gives the U.S. Air Force first-strike capability anywhere in the world, with no warning... including, say, downtown Pyongyang. To complete the poke in the eye, the Air Force issued a press release to spell out to the DPRK that the only reason it knew about these planes' participation is thanks to, well, a press release.

In other words, what they can't see can hurt them.

Supremely important

Dear readers, you know and I know that online political discussions can get messy. Personal. And of course very stupid*. That's one of the reasons why I try to stay away from anything overtly political in my postings here. You're more likely to find an in-depth discussion of China's military budget than the U.S. "fiscal cliff."

But today I'm going to briefly break my rule. Partly because I think it's an important issue. But mostly because I can't believe it's political at all: gay marriage, or, as I like to call it, equality.

To me, it's difficult to see as an issue, period. Philosophically speaking, there's not much of a cogent argument to be made against consenting adults who love each other being able to make their bond legal and permanent. Nor is there any kind of evidence that gay marriage will cause harm to society, the economy or anything else.

On a more visceral level, I am friends with many people who are gay. It seems unfathomable to support a law or practice that systematically discriminates against them for no discernible reason. I don't understand how anyone in my position could feel otherwise without suffering head-exploding cognitive dissonance.

I am less confident in my understanding of the various elements of constitutional law at play here. But as a rights issue, this--like, say, Brown vs. the Topeka Board of Education--should be a no-brainer.

All of which is just a less-dope way of saying:

*for a great example of this, check out the comments posted under the video on YouTube, where the it is hosted.

Britannia rules, colonists drool

Much has been made in the last couple of days about the Falklands' vote to remain part of Britain. The decision was almost unanimous. How almost? There were three people (out of about 1,700 votes cast) who voted to leave British rule. That the Falklanders (Falklandians? Falklandish?) do not want to become part of Argentina--or at least leave the aegis of Britain--is abundantly clear.

Meanwhile, in another former British colony, Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post took a poll about how the Hong Kongers might hypothetically feel about returning to U.K. rule. The result was that nearly three in four respondents wanted to stop being a Special Administrative Region and get back to the good old days of the British Empire.

That would seem to be a pretty solid endorsement. But there are a couple of things that bear noting.

First of all, there are a few nuts and bolts issues. It's an online poll; anyone with an Internet connection can vote. That means there is no way of guaranteeing a good sample... or even guaranteeing that the voters are in Hong Kong. To put it another way, it's not remotely scientific. Maybe if it were, it would still get the same results. But even in that case, there's another problem.

Without additional questions, there is no real way of getting at the motivations for people's votes. In other words, do Hong Kongers yearn to be British pseudo-subjects again, or do they just not want to be part of China? What if another question or voting option were, "Should Hong Kong be an independent country?" What would the responses be?

This is important, because there is a lot of subtext to both the rejection of China and the embrace of Britain. Hong Kongers, in general, harbor a certain amount of annoyance and resentment of China, which many see as kind of an uncultured older brother. Mainlanders are derided for stuff like pooping in public, invading Hong Kong stores in search of baby formula and even swarming Hong Kong hospitals.

As far as ads go, it's not particularly subtle.

Every year since the handover, there are massive street demonstrations on July 1 by Hong Kongers who want to make sure China knows they value political autonomy, freedom of speech, and so on.

Many voices, (basically) one message.

In short, Hong Kongers seem warily OK with being part of China as long as China doesn't get too much up in their business. When it seems like mainland influence is becoming too strong--for instance, when there was a push to get pro-China history courses in Hong Kong schools--people flip out a little bit.

So when given the choice of playing by China's rules or Britain's, it's pretty easy to see how polling results would play out.

And to be perfectly fair here, British rule of Hong Kong went pretty well. I have visited other former imperial colonies that suffered from more oppression and economic manipulation, and are in much worse shape today. And it's not like anyone went around tearing down British statues here after the handover. Hong Kongers, at least the ones I have met, don't have much bad to say about the way things were.

The problem, in the end, is that the poll results represent a false dichotomy. In a whole universe of choices about who is in charge, it's hard to say what Hong Kong might decide it wants.

Britain didn't really have a choice about returning Hong Kong to China in 1997; the airport and most of the water supply were in the part of Hong Kong on which the 99-year lease was running out. (Hong Kong island could have remained Britain's in perpetuity.) Today, Hong Kongers don't really have a choice about whether they can leave Chinese rule.

But if you were to ask me my opinion, my one-man poll would show I think Hong Kong could function pretty well as an independent city-state, except for the small issue of funding a military.

The universe is a basketball, and it has exploded

I really don't know what commentary to add here--it's Dennis Rodman sitting next to Kim Jong-un. And they're watching the Harlem Globetrotters (three of them, anyway) show off their fancy dribblin' in front of a crowd of identically dressed North Koreans. The clapping is polite, rhythmic and almost in unison.

And then there's a basketball game.

A slam-dunk for democracy? A propaganda exercise for the Evil Empire? WHO CARES!? My. Mind. Is. Blown.