Latest: North Korea Missile Launch Suggests Guam Is Within Reach

On Friday morning, a North Korean ballistic missile flew over the Japanese island of Hokkaido and into the Pacific Ocean.

This was the second time in less than three weeks that a missile has flown over Japan; worryingly, it came just a day after Pyongyang said that Japan “should be sunken into the sea.”

However, as sirens sounded in Japan, Americans quickly grew concerned that the real threat revealed by this latest missile test was not just against Japan but also the U.S. territory of Guam.

North Korea’s missile, believed to be an intermediate-range Hwasong-12, had flown 2,300 miles in just over 17 minutes, according to South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 
That range means that Guam, which lies 2,100 miles from North Korea, is now in reach.

“North Korea demonstrated that it could reach Guam with this missile,” David Wright, co-director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in a blog post.