What we seem to have here is a failsafe, and the right decision. The key word there is "fail", because that's what it looks like. Some internal line of communication or process broken to the extent that somebody somewhere put out an order to ground planes. (or possibly a deliberate live readiness test) You want to fail safe, the cost of briefly inconveniencing aviation is incomparable to the cost of screwing up defenses in the case of a real attack. Failing like this also gets a lot of attention which will motivate people to fix whatever the issues were that lead to it.
I'd just think of it as a test case highlighting a bug. I don't know what great harm could come from it.
That's a really fantastic point! What may initially be perceived as government incompetence is _really_ just a self correcting negative social feedback loop! Thanks for the unique perspective on this, have you worked in any of these agencies?
I view it like a flat tire. If you have a slow leak, you’re mostly in control and can get it refilled and monitor it. If you know the tire is losing air at medium speed, you can navigate to a safer space and potentially to a place to fix the issue. The worst case is a blowout while driving 70+ MPH on a highway with no shoulder while you’re only halfway paying attention to the road. All situations are about how your control is limited and maximizing your actions to get a safe & disruption free remedy. If you’re driving high speed and your low pressure light comes on, you’d be wise to at least pull over and inspect the issue. Not a perfect analogy but you get the gist.
Why try to seriously threaten the US mainland, when it’s significantly easier to hold millions of US-allied civilians hostage?
North Korean politics are game-of-thrones style medieval kings and queens. Kim Jong un is the supreme-ruler of North Korea. At a relatively young age of 38-years-old, he barely commands respect of his political apparatus.
Kim Jong-un has killed his brother and uncle in a dramatic show of force to consolidate power. It seems like he's decided that annoying the USA is now to his own political gain.
Kim Jong-un's primary motivation is to perpetuate his myth and legend, to continue to prove to his people that he's a god-given King who deserves to rule over the nation. Much like his father. But any of Kim Jong Un's political rivals can capture the "mandate of heaven" if they prove themselves worthy on the public stage.
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From the perspective of "proving that god / the heavens are on Kim Jong Un's side", pissing off the USA unnecessarily does a good job at that.
Missile threats to the US probably irritate their tacit Chinese allies less than missile threats on the Korean peninsula too...
Because if South Korea falls out of US favor for whatever reason (revolution, coup, geo-politics, Trump Jr. becoming god-king-for-life with an allergy to Korean food), the current defensive strategy stops working.
If you want to know how much help an allied civilian can expect in the long run, you could always ask the Kurds in Syria. You'll be betrayed whenever it is politically expedient.
Having ICBMs is much more effective defensive strategy, because it works against any non-insane adversary, in any set of circumstances.
First is an assumption that the capabilities of the missile being tested are "known" and a follow on assumption that the PRK does not have the capability of flying a missile as far west as Burbank, CA.
Neither of these are very good assumptions to make. To understand why, consider the following;
KP's collaborates with both the Russian Federation and China on weapons development (multiple open sources) and both of those nations have missile technology that can go from anywhere in North Korea to pretty much anywhere in the US.
KP has been telling people they have a working hypersonic ballistic missile (travel time Korea to the west coast at ~ 1hr without going sub-orbital.)
The US and KP are technically still at war (the Korean war stopped with a cease fire, not a treaty) and the US and its allies levy sanctions on them that hurt.
So while in previous tests it was both not widely believed that KP could reach the US and the KP had not said they could reach the US, both of those positions changed. That changed the threat posture from "zero" threat to "some" threat.
Fortunately physics is physics and it's pretty clear after 10 to 15 minutes what a missile is doing and what it might be able to do.
As a result I don't really think this was a "knee jerk" decision, I think it's likely policy going forward until better clarity is available on how rapidly KP's missile technology advances and an effective counter can be put into place.
And of course during the chaos Russia takes Ukraine, NATO curses and gnashes teeth but the US has KW2 on its hands and does nothing.
I have no idea what Russia will do in this scenario. Anything seems possible.
That said, I could easily see them shooting ballistic missiles into the ocean 100 miles off the west coast at random times to cause disruption and chaos in the state that provides the biggest chunk of the US GDP (California).
The FAA and US would have no choice but to react as if it "might" be heading for landfall and unable to "launch on warn" because of the geopolitical consequences of obliterating a chunk of KP when their "harmless test" did no damage at all, would be high.
So in the "perception is everything" game, KP's moves appear to me to been about making themselves look good and the US look bad.
So my non-foreign policy analyst position is that this where I see this going over the next 5 - 10 yrs.
Technically, I don't think the US and North Korea ever been at war. South Korea and North Korea are technically still at war though, as they signed the treaty with each other, not the US.
"Interference" is one possible way to call it. Another is "US Military getting ready to blast all objects in the sky with counter-nukes", and airplanes really don't want to be in the crossfire right now.
I don't really know how the US missile-defense system works. I'm imagining that old 1980s arcade game "Missile Command" though...
The missile-defense system work by using SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles). Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout. While you're correct, the planes don't want to be in that crossfire, the missile targeting system would more than easily account for civilian aircraft and avoid them.
ICBMs travel in excess of Mach 10, and typical SAMs are Mach 1 to Mach 5.
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Instead of using a small explosive to bring down an enemy nuke, surely there's an idea to use a bigger counter-nuke? Sure, there's going to be a ton of fallout, but that's still better than losing the entirety of San Francisco.
Its a lot easier to hit an enemy missile with a big-bomb, rather than using a little bomb. IE: load those SAMs with nukes and have at it. Even if you're slower, you got the strength and blast-radius of a nuke and have a better chance of bringing down the enemy ICBM.
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I don't think its an issue of "airplanes would be hit by a SAM". I think it's seriously the risk of airplanes literally getting caught in the blasts (that were aimed at the enemy missile).
Yes; Russia protects Moscow with such a system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s...
Army - Patriot
Army / Missile Defense Agency - THAAD
Army / Air Force / Missile Defense Agency - Ground-Based Midcourse Defense w/ GMI
Navy - Aegis w/ SM-3 (also, Aegis Ashore)
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3
Do it high enough up and it's got similar fallout to the atmospheric tests we used to do. Not great, but better than millions dead on the ground.
High-altitude airbursts produce essentially no fallout; fallout is from tossing irradiated ground debris into the air from a ground burst or near-ground burst. Other than the missile itself and it's target, there's nothing for a high-altitude airburst to make fallout from.
> We don't have them currently, but both the US and Russia have tinkered with the concept.
“Widely deployed”, not “tinkered with”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIR-2_Genie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_Zeus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_s... (currently active!)
Fallout is better than a city blowing up - we used to test nukes in the atmosphere, and while we've recognized that's not great, the calculus changes a bit with a nuke coming to blow up NYC or LA. You're right that we don't have nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles currently, opting for more accurate conventional ABMs, but that's more about the US and Russia trying to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
The most interesting is Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...
Basically you launch a missile that intercepts a high altitude missile and launch an object at it in a 'hit-to-kill'. It's been fairly successful in testing according to the link.
SAMs aren't an alternative to nukes because SAMs can be nukes. The (retired) US Nike-Hercules (intended for anti-bomber) and Nike-Zeus (anti-warhead and, at least in testing, also anti-satellite for Zeus B) are examples.
(Note, if you live in the Bay Area there are a whole bunch of decommissioned bases for these missiles around.)
> Having a nuke counter an ICBM will lead to far worse fallout.
Nuclear airbursts that aren't in close proximity to the ground relative to yield have essentially zero fallout (fallout is basically irradiated debris from the ground kicked into the air by the explosion.) It may or may not increase the amount of flash radiation, but that's a shorter-term, smaller area problem. But the US doesn't (at least officially, and I doubt this could be effectively concealed) rely on nuclear air-to-surface defenses any more.
But any nuclear attack has an EMP risk, and I don't think a plane is where you want to be during an EMP. Plus, people on the ground when a threat is confirmed have a better chance of being able to follow an order to shelter than those in the air.
From a civil defense perspective, “ground the planes in the potential target area immediately and unconditionally on launch warning” makes a whole lot of sense.
Getting rid of some of that clutter sounds really nice for performance.
Those don't have nuclear warheads; that went out with Nike-Zeus in the 1960s.
Except that argument sounds like an incentive to have a ten minute delay for any potential issue, no matter how little data you have and how unlikely the outcome.
Agreed. North Korea is now nuclear-armed. Every single one of those ICBMs could have a nuke on it now.
If only there were a central agency tasked providing aerospace warning, air sovereignty, and protection for Northern America.
We could call it something like the "North American Aerospace Defense Command". It could have decades of experience of this stuff!
OTOH perhaps the FAA should just make up stuff as they go.
They do exist. Talk to them, or read what they have to say. EDIT: This is the good ol' "Star Wars" missile defense problem, its been discussed for decades. I'm not myself fully up to date with it, but there's a ton of information online from Senate Hearings / House Hearings on whether or not building this missile defense was worthwhile.
They aren't really that confident in the probabilities of success in stopping a nuclear-armed ICBM. They're gonna try but its not like anyone has ever actually shot a nuke at the USA yet. The ultimate test of pragmatism has never happened yet.
There's almost no certainty that we can stop an ICBM. We have untested systems and untested warning systems that the Soviet Union never even bothered to test. But now there's a rogue nation trying to play tough guy sitting across the Pacific Ocean with nuclear weapons and an experimental ICBM platform.
If an ICBM gets launched, the USA is probably going to throw everything we got to try to stop the missile. Then we'll probably fail, and the city will get nuked anyway. But we gotta do everything within our power to make the probability of success as high as possible.
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San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. etc. Any of those cities could be lost within a few minutes under these scenarios. If people are saying that this airplane stop-order was over a nuke, I think its actually 100% reasonable to have done these stop-flying orders.
These aren’t secrets. They’re well publicized facts that haven’t changed since the 1950s.
Yes, we know what path it probably will take, but to actually _HIT_ such a target requires extremely precise tracking and positioning.
What we do know, is that they ground the entire West Coast's airplanes when an ICBM from North Korea is launched. My guess is that those radars probably work better when there's fewer airplanes in the sky. Hard to know for sure, the spooks don't seem to be talking about the details. But I'm working backwards here with Occam's razor.
This isn’t the first test, yet this is the first temporary grounding. Occam’s Razor suggests someone in the west coast ATC fucked up.
This one also crashed into the ocean, but it got further along. In particular, there seems to be confirmations that this DPRK ICBM test did in fact reach Mach 10.
If this is the first ICBM to reach hypersonic speeds and had something that looked like an intercontinental launch cycle, it would make sense to take it seriously.
*EVERY* ICBM hits hypersonic speeds.
The Hwasong-12 (EDIT: Hwasong-8 I mean) missile test only reached Mach 3, which is slower than hypersonic.
If this is the first successful hypersonic missile from North Korea, that's big news, and possibly warranting the severe response that our nuclear defense forces (probably) gave to the FAA.
Nothing you’ve been asserting makes any sense at all.
https://www.nknews.org/2022/01/north-korea-fires-unidentifie...
For scale: Hawaii is not only ten times as far away, that missile landed in the sea west of japan.
The hysteria displayed both by the FAA and in this thread is kinda shocking. I work with the military in Japan. Every time a North Korean missile flies into/over Japanese territory we get a warning about it...and then go about our business as usual. We can usually see their flight trajectories on our Common Operational Picture. This one was not significantly different from the dozen or so previous incidents. No idea why people in the States shat a brick and grounded civilian aircraft, especially if NORAD didn't concur with such an action.
A Groundstop (for NY area) wasn't issued on 9/11 until 9:06, 20 minutes after this event and 3 minutes after the second plane hit.
Flight 93 took off at 08:42, four minutes before the first plane hit the towers. Additionally, it was known well before the groundstop order that Flight 77 had already deviated at 08:54 and turned off its transponder at 08:56.
A "better safe than sorry" groundstop may have saved lives impacted by Flight 77 (Pentagon attack), even more if Flight 93 (PA crash) had been delayed by several minutes more.
I'm sure this has something to do with the calculus.
Isn't this kind of a tautological statement? If there's a low probability of high damage, and that high damage ends up not happening, then two things happened. First, a small amount of "harm" happens from the extra caution. Second, it did "no good" since the bad thing didn't happen.
So, by definition it did more harm than good. Which is a good thing in the big picture. To believe otherwise is to basically invalidate any scenario of applying caution to low-probability high-damage scenarios.
So yeah, better safe than sorry when you have a tense moment in between two hostile, nuclear-armed nations. I would rather see a bunch of travelers deal with the inconvenience of cascading delays than see some US air defense system shoot a plane out of the sky.
FAA: Iran had a professional military too. And the Soviets and Russians too, and its happened there.
NORAD: Fuck you.
FAA: We're grounding to keep people safe, the military industrial complex is out of control, dangerous, and a threat to American well being.
I side with the FAA. Military systems are extremely dangerous around civilians and the kool-aid the military drinks in terms of their effectiveness and safety doesn't often mesh with reality. The military runs killing machines and when those machines are active its best to get people out of the way. There are no safe killing machines.
I assume it is more about anti-ballistic missile activity and not wanting a mistake to happen where the US gov't takes down a passenger flight(?)