The news is out this morning that Kim Jong-Un is still building new missiles in N. Korea. But the White House is sending the message that it isn’t worried about it because they are still negotiating:
NY POST – Team Trump on Tuesday minimized revelations that US spy agencies believed that North Korea was building new missiles in the same research facility that manufactured earlier ballistic missiles capable of reaching the US.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told Fox News that the news was no big deal because the US and Kim Jong-un’s rogue were still negotiating.
“We’ll see what happens,’ Conway said, borrowing one of President Trump’s stock responses.
“Things don’t change overnight,” she added, arguing that the news “suggests that this is a process.”
She is right that things don’t change overnight. But many are still worried that N. Korea is trying to pull the wool over Trump’s eyes, or that he already has.
Here’s the report from this morning from the BBC:
On Monday, the Washington Post newspaper quoted officials as saying North Korea appeared to be building one or two new liquid-fuelled intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at the Sanumdong facility near the capital, Pyongyang.
The factory is known to have produced the Hwasong-15, the first North Korean ICBM capable of reaching the US.
However, a US official told news agency Reuters that a liquid-fuelled ICBM didn’t “pose nearly the threat that a solid-fuelled one would because they take so long to fuel”.
Reuters also added that satellite imaging showed vehicles moving in and out of the facility, but not the extent of any missile construction.
Satellite imagery of the Sanumdong facility shows that the site is “active”, Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) told the Washington Post.
“[The facility] is not dead, by any stretch of the imagination,” said Mr Lewis. “We see shipping containers and vehicles coming and going. This is a facility where they build ICBMs and space-launch vehicles.”
Trump said that North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat. But notice here that they aren’t just building any missile here, they are building ICBMs. That doesn’t bode well for Trump’s claim that they are no longer a threat.