re: #1 Political Atheist

Our interceptors work 1/2 the time under ideal conditions when the path of the missile is known and the design of the missile is known. And decoys aren’t really that hard, you just stuff a couple of completely dummy warheads in the missile too. The idea that North Korea could manage to make nuclear warheads but is too dumb to figure out how to make dummy warheads is kinda weird.

Greely is an entirely untested site. Expecting an untested site to have a success on the first try is optimistic, to say the least.

However, all this goes the same for North Korea. Putting the dummy warheads on the missile— or just achieving the same effect by having us unable to recognize the separation in the descent— is all well and good, but they have to aim and target the missile over thousands of miles, going out of atmosphere and back into it. The fuel mix has to be precisely right, etc. etc. They might be able to hit ‘Alaska’ in general. The warhead might or might not explode. It’s still friggin’ scary, and it will get scarier in the future, but for right now it’s not panic panic time for the US.

Their ability to nuke Japan is something I’m more worried about. That is a much shorter distance using missiles they have far more practice with.

But I am still more worried about him simply launching a conventional war against South Korea, and feeding his citizens into the meat grinder.