Nothing is made in North Korea besides a lot of moaning and wailing by assigned North Korean mourners and celebrants. This guy thinks he's Vadimir Putin, except he broke the horse trying to mount it from the rear. ewww....

@Warren: Give it up. Your photo is more comical than your jokes.

Pu$$y just like your father.

Don't worry Kim it happens to guys once in awhile.

I think we've set a Newsvine record for consecutive comments made by people named Warren. Note: this guy ain't kidding. The pull-my-finger joke in North Korea is the equivalent of unsuccessful masturbation, since you can't get either finger out of the hole in the bamboo if you're pulling too hard. Ya'z schtuck like a duck.

LMAO at 4am....

@ Warren: You and people like you are uneducated hypocrites. According to the Washington Post, almost 50 million people in America, (including almost one child in four) struggle to get enough to eat on any given day.

Fix your own problems before point the finger at other nations.

"So as it had announced, if the North has a problem with the first-stage control module, it has to replace it and take down (the rocket) from the top," Kwon said.

So the rubber band broke?

Yep. The "sexiest man on earth" has a weekly appointment to get the hairs removed from between his teeth.

And this also points to the idiocy of contending that North Korea is planning on using this rocket or a derivative as an ICBM. There are a number of reasons why this is NOT a military rocket and is not included in the UN bans:

1) No country like North Korea is stupid enough to consider that a three-state liquid-fueled rocket would be suitable for carrying a nuclear warhead. First of all, a three-stage rocket is nine times more likely to fail than a one-stage rocket. And a liquid-fueled rocket is up to 40 times as likely to fail as a solid-fuel single-stage rocket.

2) No country is stupid enough to believe that if they tried to put a warhead on a three-stage liquid-fueled rocket --- a process that takes several weeks --- that we would not send just one conventional Tomahawk missile to take it out sometime in that several weeks before it is even launched.

3) For the most part NK's nukes are too heavy to deliver by missile. Period. They are a full half-century behind in miniturization, blast amplification, and other niceties of modern nukes. What they likely have is a "Fat Man" implosion type bomb in the Nagasaki yield range or slightly better --- 21-33 KILOtons. It likely weighs in at around 10,000 pounds. A reasonably competent high school or college student could, given the access to plutonium and the necessary machine tools and explosives could build one. Admittedly, the North Koreans could strip all the shielding and kill the assembly crew and get it down to around 8,ooo pounds, but that would be a last-ditch effort. "Fat Kim" will require one of their Beagle bombers to deliver.

4) A blast from a Fat Man-type nuke would be far from devastating --- if you look at the Nagasaki damage, only around 50,000 people were killed, the major damage was actually caused by the resulting firestorm, and only about a 4-mile wide circle suffered a devastating blow. But, strangely, railroad tracks, roads, and bridges were uneffected, even directly under both bombs dropped on Japan. A blast of this size would do no significant tactical or strategic damage outside of the Korean Peninsula. It would be just big enough to really, really piss someone off (or destroy Seoul.) One of the little myths of WWII is that the weapon that would have actually prevented an invasion of the Japanese mainland was that fire-bombing was so much less expensive and more effective than even the nukes.

5) This rocket, like the previous one, is being launched into polar orbit. This allows the satellite to eventually come over around 85% of the Earth's surface. Good for reconnaissance satellites, but worthless for an ICBM which would be a rather more difficult point-to-point ground-to-ground launch.

6) North Korea sells military rockets (including large semi-guided SCUD variants and anti-ship missiles.) Putting a satellite into orbit would help their cachet in arms sales. And NKs isolation from the rest of the world, including China, means that they have zero satellite reconnaissance capability. This means that they would always have less of an element of surprise than any enemy.

7) North Korea is, however, working with Iran to develop large single-stage solid-fuel rockets and their guidance systems. For this, NK is exchanging nuclear technology (and possibly some plutonium) and their vast expertise in hardening military targets.

Yes, NK will learn some new information on rocketry from a launch that could be applied to a future missile system. But the amount of useful information is sparse and still leaves them fifty years behind us. Neither NK nukes nor NK missiles pose a significant threat outside the Korean Peninsula. If NK wanted to hit the US, rather than a ICBM, they would more likely use a fishing trawler converted to fire a single nuclear-tipped SCUD (actually a Hwahsong-6) from just outside the 200-mile limit off Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco or a similar seaboard city. Even easier, just put it in a shipping containber and sea freight it to the US and set it up to explode when the container is opened. No missile even needed.

Actually, you're a lot closer to the truth than you think. Most commercial GPS units, such as the ones sold to be used on aircraft and boats, provide for transmission of key location data, including absolute coordinates, and altitude, directly to a computer. You can buy these GPS units right off eBay or from a boating or aviation supply store.

Even nuclear weapons can be created using eBay parts. For example, in the original Fat Man, the very difficult thing was to get 64 explosive shaped charges to all fire at precisely the same time. Even a few nanoseconds difference would cause the bomb to fizzle. It was a tough problem in WWII, requiring silver wire and capacitors and a primitive electronic times to resolve. Now you can get "slave" camera flashes that can perform the same function, using fiber optics instead of wires, right off eBay.

That's how much the world has changed in the last 50+ years.

Actually, North Korea has posted the same types of aviation, maritime, and diplomatic notices that we would post for a launch from Kennedy. Actually the missile is to be fired SSW and its projected flight path does not cross over any other countries. There isn't any "if" because the first and second stages are all sub-orbital and would fall back to earth no matter what. These should fall into the South China Sea in international waters. The concern the US Navy expressed was that 1) the missile might not have command detonation, 2) it might veer off course and the North Koreans not have the ability to tell it, and 3) that in the process of failing and not being command detonated, it, or one of its components, might appear to be falling to Earth onto Japan or some other country. This is a lot of "mights." In all likelihood, it the missile fails, it will be in early flight where dynamic pressures are the greatest or in failing to put the satellite into a viable orbit.

The real reason the Navy is moving ships into the area is not to shoot down the missile. This would be at the very limits of the Navy's capability without committing an act of war in the process. The Navy is there hoping to recover pieces of the first and second stages of the rocket so they can assess the start of the art in North Korea. Most likely the Navy would use a Standard-3 missile to take a shot. But the range of the Standard (270nm) and service ceiling (100nm) is so low that it would not be a likely kill. The problem is that the Standard is intended to shoot down missiles that are aimed near the ship firing the missile. This is a very easy shot compared to shooting at a missile traversing overhead. Roughly the difference between shooting at a very slow moving target that is increasing in size and shooting at a much smaller rapidly moving target that is shrinking in size. These difficulties are why the Airborne Laser was such a flop.

Because it would be an act of war that would cause everything in South Korea from the DMZ inland about 30nm to simply disappear. Within fifteen minutes of such an act, the entire Seoul-Inchon Corridor and all military and civilian targets along the DMZ, including 20,000 American and 120,000 ROKA soldiers would be destroyed. (That's why the US forces are called tripwire or sacrificial forces and never appear in any Order of Battle.) That would cost South Korea around 40% of its population and 80% of its industrial capacity, along with its major port, financial, political, and military capitals.

The North Koreans count on the U.S. and South Korea to be smart enough to NOT "arm a drone with a Hellfire missile and have the NK rocket 'accidentally' explode 30 seconds after launch." If such a thing was done, there would be no way that any North Korean regime could not respond with a full scale war and still stay in power.

It would be a costly error, that's why!