CNN:
North Korea recently did something it has never done before: it tried to launch a new missile four times in two months, and failed every time. At least once they even destroyed the launch platform, only to try again from a new site.
The Musudan missile isn’t really “new.” It showed up in North Korea over a decade ago, and it seems to be based on a 1960s-era Soviet design with some local modifications.
It appeared to be a mobile intermediate-range missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead as far as the critical U.S. base at Guam. Indeed, it may have been optimized for that specific mission. But for 10 years, the North Koreans apparently never tested the Musudan to see if it would work. Now they know that it doesn’t.
That is new. North Korea’s missiles usually fail the first time — even the less ambitious, shorter-ranged Nodong exploded on the pad during the first launch attempt. But in the past, the North Koreans have always done what sensible engineers do in the face of failure — stand down, figure out what went wrong, and fix it before trying again. For a missile, this can take months or even years. The North Koreans have always been patient. And, in spite of the hardships they have labored under, they have usually managed to get their rockets working by the third or fourth try.
A test flight of the Musudan was long overdue, but repeating the attempt three times so soon after the first catastrophic failure can only be described as foolish and desperate. There was little chance of success no matter how many rockets they launched, and if by pure dumb luck one of them had worked there would have been little chance of understanding why that one worked where the others didn’t. The logical conclusion is that they don’t really care — they aren’t trying to develop a weapon that can be trusted to work in wartime, but just need one successful flight to send a message.
The message is presumably political. From a technical standpoint, the Musudan gives North Korea no capability it didn’t already have except to target Guam. Possibly the regime felt it needed to demonstrate that specific capability — Guam is the only sovereign U.S. territory North Korea could hope to reach with its current weapons. Possibly they just wanted to demonstrate something new to prove they were still playing the game, and the Musudan was what they had available. The intended audience may have been domestic, or Chinese, in which case we may never understand the details
