Popular Mechanics: Japan’s Self Defense Forces deployed a Patriot missile launcher in downtown Tokyo over the weekend, asNorth Korea reportedly gears up for a missile launch. The launcher, deployed among a maze of high-rise office buildings and parked outside the Ministry of Defense headquarters, will function as a last-ditch defense should a missile head towards Japan’s capital.
The announcement last week of suspicious activity at North Korea’s Sonhae Satellite Launching Station prompted Japanese officials to move to a higher state of defense preparedness. The two countries are only 300 miles apart, separated by the Sea of Japan, and North Korea has repeated threatened Japan over the years with military action.
In 1998, a North Korean Taepodong-1 missile flew over Japanese territory, and since then Japan has constructed a multi-layered ballistic missile defense system. A series of J/FPS-5 radars, (nicknamed “Gamera” after the giant monster turtle) deployed across the country provide early warning against incoming ballistic missiles. Each “Gamera” radar can detect and identify targets at ranges of up to 620 miles, handing the information off to the actual combat systems that can shoot down missiles.
Japan’s first layer of “shooters” are its fleet of Aegis destroyers. Japan has four Kongo-class destroyers capable of downing ballistic missiles with a combination of the Aegis radar system and SM-3 Block 1A missile interceptors. Japan believes that just three destroyers can defend the entire country, but is increasing the number of destroyers that can perform this role to eight.
Backing up the Aegis destroyers are Japan’s Patriot PAC-3 missiles. A descendant of the original Patriot missile that was used against Iraqi Scuds in the first Gulf War, the PAC-3 is optimized to work against ballistic missiles. Smaller than earlier versions of the Patriot, a single PAC-3 canister carries four missiles instead of one. The PAC-3 also has a much shorter range, and is deployed across the country as a point defense for potential targets including air bases, economic infrastructure, and cities.
As both the capital of Japan and home to a quarter of its citizens, Tokyo is very much a big, fat target. And although a launch from Sonhae will almost certainly be a missile test and not an attack, North Korea’s erratic nature means Japan can never quite rule anything out. While the gesture is in many ways symbolic, meant to reassure the 30 million people in Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area, the deployment of the eight PAC-3 missiles does give real protection in case Pyongyang has something unexpected in mind.
To view the original article, please click here.
