Not So Fun Anymore

North Korea has always been the butt of a joke. Even The Interview was never taken seriously, and with its release in 2014, the movie was also labelled as a Comedy. North Korea’s warnings follow the same pattern: they threaten war, and North Korea always crawls back into its hole when other countries toss back a first-aid kit. Recently, however, the entire world has been tip-toeing around North Korea upon the news of its first successful Intercontinental Ballistic Missile test. Ever since then, the growing silence is deafening; when will North Korea make its next move?

It’s quite ironic and of course, an obvious plan, that North Korea chose the Fourth of July to launch the ICBM, implying many things- including serious new threats against United States’ national security. According to The Washington Post, Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that “North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will be able to produce a reliable, nuclear-capable ICBM program sometime in 2018.” This means that within a year, the prototype will be on assembly lines in North Korea, smoothly shaving off a good two years of researching and testing that the United States had predicted. While the missile only travelled about 580 miles, its maximum range lies around 4,160 miles, posing a real danger to all of Alaska...and soon the mainland.

With North Korea’s provocative move in mind, the United States’ government and President Trump should start by avoiding the temptation to do nothing and remain ignorant. Clearly, an immediate military response is foolish, considering the possibility of failure and an eventual nuclear war is high. Yet it is also no longer the time to sit back and laugh at our phone screens. However pessimistic this sounds, the next time we look up, we very well may be nose to nose with a nuclear-tipped missile.