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Article snippet: North Korea’s latest intercontinental ballistic missile test has provoked understandable alarm, particularly among Americans worried about the threat. But many analysts reacted with something closer to grizzled stoicism, greeting the launch as dispiriting but unsurprising confirmation of North Korea’s capabilities and intentions. For them, news of the test, like the missile program itself, is unwelcome and concerning but not too terrifying. It’s worth reviewing, then, some of the fundamentals that guide those experts’ views of North Korea and its weapons. (1) It’s over. North Korea is a nuclear power now. Policymakers will debate for years the precise moment at which the door closed to preventing or rolling back North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. But that door is most likely now closed. The North Koreans have little reason to give up their weapons programs, which bring them security against their otherwise vastly superior adversaries, and we have no way to make them. Well, there’s one way: an invasion. But North Korea’s missiles are mobile, meaning it could fire off at least one or two before the United States could take them out. Full-on war would be virtually guaranteed to bring an attempted North Korean nuclear strike against a major American city. (This assumes North Korea can mount a warhead on a missile, but we have little reason to doubt that it can.) In technical terms, that is described as a “credible deterrent capability.” In nontechnical terms... Link to the full article to read more