President Trump Threatens to "Totally Destroy" North Korea.

[The_Yoda]

NATO said:

The_Yoda said:

I had heard that their rockets keep falling apart (perhaps that is true, perhaps it is not, for now I'll assume it is), I don't know about killing hundreds of thousands but if the ones they are flying over Japan happen to break up it could kill a small number of people.  I wouldn't think they would waste any kind of warhead they are still testing.

The missle shot over Hokkaido was a Hwasong-12, a 28 tonne ballistic missle that cruises at 2100+ km above ground, if it failed and landed on hokkaido it would be carrying approximately 5/8th of it's fuel payload, that means along with the missle itself hitting a populated area at high speed, it's propellant chambers would explode, of which is mainly udmh and rfna, that sort of payload, at that sort of speed would potentially take out an area between 12km2 along a linear path, it's flight path put it smack bang over the city of sapporo, which is an area of 1121km2, and a population of 5.47million, thus 12km2 would be roughly 1.1% of the greater sapporo area, or around 60,170 of the population overall, increasing exponentially the closer it got to the city center.

Just because a missle isn't carrying a bomb, doesn't mean it isn't a dangerous thing.

I'm not saying it isn't a dangerous thing but I'd only heard about bits of them flying off not the entire thing crashing and burning. Either way he's taking a big risk flying anything over Japan without warning (i.e. such as the warning when they were "launching satellites" some years back) considering their supposed track record. You could be correct if things went perfectly wrong.  I was imaginging a scenario where just a bit of on of the missles comes off and kills a person, or a few people and/or does property damage.