North Korea s leader Kim Jong Un claims the Hwasong-18 solid fuel intercontinental ballistic missile will ‘radically promote’ the country s nuclear counter attack capabilities. Experts say it could indeed change the security situation on the peninsula
hans nichols is doing double duty over at the white house. my fault, hans, because i m here and not there. but thank you. tell us what we re learning about this launch, what president trump s saying, and what you re hearing from your sources at the pentagon. reporter: the initial assessment from officials at the pentagon is this is a three-stage missile. that would mark the first time they had three stages to a liquid fuel missile. the other thing we re hearing at the pentagon is how different this missile is. it does represent a new variant. they haven t given it a designation on the u.s. side yet. but when you look at what this missile does and how they launched it, another key difference is how quickly they launched it. they didn t have a big lead time. in the pentagon, the term they have of that is left of launch. how much time, how much preparation does u.s. intelligence have to take a look at what they doiring. they did see some viewing stands being built.
to disrupt north korean missiles with cyber attacks. president obama accelerated the program. if you track what s happened to the missile tests since then you discover an unusually high failure rate. for the most potent intermediate range missile, last year that failure rate was 88%. reporte it s not clear in if missiles were hacked. experts tresz hacks of missiles are almost impossible to detect and things like poor design or bad engineering could cause them to fail. any of the things that electronically happen, the ignition of the fuel, the staging of the missile, the cut off of fuel burn with liquid fuel missile, the guidance system, any of those things and
mattis leaves for a weeklong trip to the middle east that will include stops in saudi arabia, israel, egypt, and the horn of africa. fox news has learned from well-placed defense sources the type of medium-range missiless that north korea tried to test this weekend with a new kind of scud known as a k ends atsi scud known as a kn-17, a single stage liquid fuel missile. officials here are not commenting when asked if u.s. cyber command had any role in causing the lunch to fail. it s notable that 88% of the intermediate range lucid on missiles that north korea hadin tried to test since a year ago have blown up within seconds of launch. 5 out of 6 launches have failed. the most noteworthy addition to this year s parade ine pyongyang where these two long canisters that appeared for the first time and experts say are typically used for long-range missiles. it is important to remember that north korea has neverem successfully tested a missile capable of reaching the u.s. and a lot of what wa