To clarify- he believes he has missiles that work, and could nuke the US.
Nah, he didn't believe that, the deal was to get other people to believe it. Remember the point I made that NK always highlighted how far their missiles could go (in theory), but were very short of demonstrations of targeting prowess. e.g. a salesman who's very keen to sell you a used car, turns the engine on and lets you hear it, talks about mpg and comfort features, but steers clear of actually demonstrating that the thing can actually move in a straight line.
The east coast is pretty dense, you can aim for the general area and still hit a populated area.
NK did go and pull a 'hold my beer' moment last year by claiming that they could aim and hit a 100 mile (or kilometer) ring around the island of Guam and hit water instead of the island itself.
USA's East coast? There's no evidential basis for starting to worry about NK hitting the east coast. Given the ability to shoot in any direction, London will be at risk before New York is. And that's where this starts to veer from reality to fantasy. NK
wanted you to believe they're an emerging world military power capable of hitting anywhere on Earth (if they
could hit New York they could also by definition hit all capital cities in the Northern Hemisphere) but it's plainly not true - they're a tiny nation with a shoestring budget and outdated tech, and failing obsolete infrastructure. It's frankly ridiculous to believe they could develop (in any reasonable time frame) the ability to devastate Paris, London, New York, Moscow, New Dehli, Cairo, Tel Aviv, and Sydney, etc etc etc, which is what the "east coast" claim entails.
EDIT: remember they
said that they were going to fire Hwasong-12 rockets at Guam last year, and made claims about the accuracy beforehand, but they didn't follow through with the actual demonstration. So you have their
word that the accuracy was as they claim, but then somebody pulled the plug on the physical demonstration. They could have easily aimed at an empty patch of ocean, at the appropriate distance, giving out coordinates beforehand, thus proving their claims to the world. There was no need to actually target Guam, just target some random patch of ocean. It would have proved their words, but they've made no attempts at doing so. e.g. they never make targeting demonstrations, and at least one time they pointed out an actual target beforehand, they failed to carry out the demonstration.