North Korea

North Korea launched a ballistic missile Sunday afternoon which flew more than 500 kilometers, only one week after conducting its latest, successful ballistic missile test last Sunday, South Korea's military announced. The missile was launched at 0759 GMT from a location near Pukchang, 60 km northeast of the capital Pyongyang, an area where North Korea attempted to test-launch another missile last month but failed, South Korea's Office of Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement quoted by Yonhap.

With the media narrative once again focused squarely on Trump and the "Russian connection", something which will unlikely change over the next week absent "fireworks" elsewhere, the story of potential military intervention in South Korea has understandably dropped from the front pages. Although with a second US aircraft carrier now en route to the Korean Peninsula, and with Trump desperate for another "big bang" distraction, is it shortsighted to underestimate the potential of another geopolitical hotspot emerging in the next few days.

The following article by David Haggith was published first on The Great Recession Blog:

One month ago, when we first discussed that in addition to the CVN-70 Carl Vinson aircraft carrier group, the US was deploying two more carriers toward the Korean peninsula, some took the Yonhap-sourced report skeptically: after all, what's the incremental symbolic impact of having two aircraft carriers next to North Korea when just one would more than suffice.

Authored by Peter Pry, chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, op-ed via The Hill,

Since Sept. 11, 2001, analysts have been increasingly concerned terrorists might steal, buy, build, or be given a nuclear weapon — and the War on Terrorism would become a nuclear war. The Department of Homeland Security’s National Planning Scenario #1 is detonation of a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, in a location such as New York City or Washington, D.C.