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[Reelya]

Good point there, Jong Il spent the first 4 years of life living on whatever war rations the Russians were willing to give out to idle Korean/Chinese expat battalions stationed in the East while they were busy fighting the Germans in the West.

And "stingy" isn't the word for the Stalinist regime.

https://keepcalmandremember.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/everyday-hardship-the-red-army-soldiers-diet/

In advance of an operation, however, Red Army soldiers would be issued some sort of sustenance that wouldn’t immediately spoil. This was often black bread and sausages, or perhaps a tin of SPAM; America sent huge amounts of SPAM to the USSR as part of the Lend-Lease Agreement, and the food was a welcome help. In particularly tough times, however, soldiers were left to find their own food. They learned to forage and to rely on the generosity of civilians; female soldiers were usually sent on the latter errand, since they would seem less intimidating to frightened civilians!

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Bad enough to take more-or-less sixteen years off, though? Sung also lived through all that and was on the lines of war, so even as an adult you have to count some of that malus for him as well.

[Reelya]

What do you mean "more or less 16 years".

The life expectancy for a man born today in USA is only 78. And that figure is taking into account future medical improvements by estimating it based on current trends.

The life expectancy for a man born in 1941 was less than that. Jong Il was just average because you're using unrealistic estimates of life expectancy.

But yeah anyway, extreme hardship in your formative years does cut decades off life. And anyway, it's sort of not relevant here. If the claim is that Jong Un inherited bad genes, because his father died at 70, then where did the bad genes comes from? There's no evidence that Jung Il's mother was generally in poor health, and actually, out of the remaining families members, their health outcomes are pretty average for any family. Having one 71 year old aunt who's a bit sickly, and another female relative who died of breast cancer isn't out of the ordinary for even healthy families. 1 in 8 women get breast cancer, it's going to be expected that at least one relative has it per 8.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I think that national life expectancy is not at all as indicative as family life expectancy. Sung lived to be 86, even having been through harsh conditions. Yet his son, a single generation away, lived to be 70. And both of them died of heart attacks. Does that not say something to you?

[Reelya]

Living through tough conditions and being born into tough conditions are totally different things. Formative years matter.

If you're e.g. 30 and you live through WWII on reduced rations it's not going to have the same impact as being born into that and living through it for most of your childhood. Jong Il's first 4 years were living on war rations in WWII Russia, as the son of a foreign battalion leader that never saw combat (hence was very low priority for supplies), then they had a struggle to create a nation when the half the world was against them and they were carving something out of previously Japanese-occupied Korea. And not even the good fertile South, the cold and mountainous North.

I imagine that food was not a reliable resource during those years. Their allies were also no help. Russia was trying to get their shit back together after losing 20 million war dead, while China was in the middle of the Civil war and creation of the PRC. Basically none of the friendly nations around them would have had any resources to spare.

[ChairmanPoo]

*shrug* Sometimes people just get bad luck and get very ill. Lifestyle wasn't necessarily healthy, either (In the last few months I've become more convinced than ever of the unhealthiness of drinking). Also, I doubt as to the avaiability of resources, EVEN for the elite, in a country like North Korea.  IMO medicine is not something that can really work on "small scale ivory tower resources for the elite, blood and shit for everyone else". If you don't have a good base system in which people can  get trained and get experience... even your best will be green behind the ears.  And I seriously doubt NK has any decent capability of attracting foreign talent, in particular western medical expertise (I mean, consider what going to NK to treat the Dear Leader implies. As I said before... sometimes people get very sick and die, despite your best efforts. Do you want to risk being the one to give the bad news to NK high command?). IMO: if unwell, Kim's best bet would probably be to try to get treated at a friendly country with better healthcare infrastructure (maybe Cuba?).

[RedKing]

America sent huge amounts of SPAM to the USSR

And now, 75 years later, they're repaying the favor. (sorry, couldn't resist)

[smjjames]

Given the distance involved, it would be pretty tricky to get him into Cuba unnoticed. Besides, China is right there.

[martinuzz]

NK launched another missile. This one reached a record height of 4500km before plunging into the Japanese Sea.
Experts calculated that with that height range, the missile will have a tactical range of 13000km, and with that, be able hit any US city.

UN security council called yet another emergency meeting.

[Trekkin]

Do we have any idea as to the CEP of their reentry vehicles? As far as I know, none of their missile tests have included a guided terminal phase.

[smjjames]

What's CEP? Common Entry Point? Anyway, haven't heard anything on their progress on re-entry capabilities, which is the last hurdle they have. Also, this latest missile ended up uncomfortably close to their territorial waters, not declaration of war zone, more "HEY! WATCH WHAT THE FUCK YOURE DOING!" zone.

Incidentally, in order to test reeentry properly, they're going to have to do more typical trajectories instead of the near vertical reentries they typically do to avoid flying over Japan. Which means that we'll be seeing more flying over Japan. Or possibly more southward.

There's also rumors that they'll fire one or more missiles during the Winter Olyimpics in SK, maybe even detonate a nuke, and it's a pretty large window. If they're so brazen as to do that (especially if they detonate a nuke), then I think their athletes should be stripped of any medals they won for that Olympics and booted out. Even Putin wasn't so brazen as to invade Ukraine during the Olympics (though being the host was likely an additional factor).

[Starver]

I presumed...

If we knew that they were 'aiming the same' each time they fired, then it'd be a simple back-calculation to see how well they do, but if they're changing their nominal aiming point (if any!) each time then it gets complicated. Doubtless those with powers greater than mine have scrutinised naval radars looking for NK 'fishing vessels' sailing in suspiciously similar loose configurations so as to 'net' targeted areas for observation, or somesuch, perhaps indicating the invisible target-point on each occasion, to see if how well (and how better, as time goes by) they're actually doing with actual trajectories.

Harder still if it was purely "pick a spot, fire at it, work with the transmitted telemetry", but if there's been any ELINT pickgup of that, no doubt they're analysing the encrupted "...going left a bit, going right a bit, WHOOPS! Now we're tumbling and way off course!" signal.

[Reelya]

Google says "circular error probable". I've heard that as a measurement before, it's the circle in which 50% of rounds are expected to land from a particular weapon system.

The hiatus for the North Korean weapons test occurred directly after they did a flight which happened to overshoot Japan. My hunch is that this was unintentional, and the fight was supposed to fall to the west of Japan (The Sea Of Japan), like all their other test flights normally do. They took a three-month break from launches as soon as that happened, which backs up the idea that it was a mistake, and their targeting systems are in fact pretty crap.

Remember, the entire point of a nuclear ICBM program is to have a credible threat to act as a deterrent, nobody actually fires the things at each other. Whether they work in a "real nuclear war" is almost besides the point here. North Korea's leadership knows that if they actually nuked anyone they'd be utterly destroyed. So all that North Korea should invest in is a rocket that can go really far - theoretically - and a big bomb that could theoretically go on said rocket. Diverting resources to making better long-range guidance systems would in fact be a waste of North Korea's limited resources, given how focused they need to be on the "main points" of rocket + bomb. In fact, spending effort to make sure the bomb fits on the rocket might be a waste of time. Just explode a bigger bomb and shoot a bigger rocket and claim they fit together.

[smjjames]

I wouldn't be surprised if they changed their target zone each time just to keep us guessing. We can already tell that they have pretty good control of where the missile goes, if not lands. The missile landed where it did by virtue of the elongated parabolic trajectory and the Earth rotating. Though I wonder if that's as close as they'd like to get or if they'd try to inch closer to Japanese territorial waters just to see what they'd get away with.

Google says "circular error probable". I've heard that as a measurement before, it's the circle in which 50% of rounds are expected to land from a particular weapon system.

The hiatus for the North Korean weapons test occurred directly after they did a flight which happened to overshoot Japan. My hunch is that this was unintentional, and the fight was supposed to fall to the west of Japan (The Sea Of Japan), like all their other test flights normally do. So they put it on hiatus while they worked out how to avoid that - there's a real risk that it could have landed on Japan if anything went wrong with the rocket itself, and I'm betting North Korea realizes that actually landing a rocket on Japanese territory would be really bad shit for them.

So if that hunch is correct, then it hammers home that their actual guidance tech is lagging badly behind the other stuff. I mean, they're a small impoverished nation. It makes no sense for them to have an advance nuclear program and and advanced rocket program and an advanced guidance computer development system. Having any one of those things with significant investment of personnel and resources for such a small nation actually makes it less likely that they have resources to spare on the other areas, not more likely.

This one was really dang close to territorial waters though, enough to go "HEY! WATCH WHAT YOURE DOING!"

Also, it seemed like they were intentionally trying to thread the needle through the strait between Hokkaido and the main island, which would be the best option available if they didn't want to shoot it southwards.

[Reelya]

Lofted trajectories don't intercept as much atmosphere as a regular long-range flight however, so how such missiles would function on a proper long-range flight is anyone's guess. Also, the point of ICBM isn't to get the entire rocket to hit a specific point - that would be a failure. That's not how ICBMs really work.

The point is the multiple stages that detach outside the atmosphere, releasing re-entry vehicles which deliver a working nuclear device to the target, with the right working electronics to detonate it correctly (usually before it collides with the ground). If it just slams into the ground it probably won't detonate at all, that's been the experience of U.S. planes carrying nuclear bombs that have crashed or accidentally dropped bombs - none of them ever detonated, so just hitting the ground in the vicinity of your target isn't really all that likely to cause a proper nuclear detonation.

So we know that something hit the ocean at that particular point, and it was launched from North Korea. But we don't have any evidence that this was a properly detached and functional payload that could steer itself for re-entry, with heat shielding allowing the warhead detonation system to survive the trip back down, and then detonate a nuclear device, rather than just the spent stages of the rocket that went up, and continued in a parabolic arc.