https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html?_r=0
This is a rich and detailed article about North Korea's capabilities, it's testing methods, the attempts and approaches the Obama administration had taken and the current state of the issue. The threat seems to be the biggest threat America will face, and the world to a larger extent. Obama personally warned Trump that this is the most immediate threat the US would face.
North Korea can comfortably reach
all of the developed world if it successfully tests its KN-08, which can go as far as Spain on the other side of the world. Its KN-14, to a lesser extent, will reach at a maximum distance of the US. NYT shows images of both being paraded, they have not been flight tested yet. It is already too late to stop North Korea from learning how to make destructive weapons, the only thing possible now is to disrupt as much as possible.
Advocates of the sophisticated effort to remotely manipulate data inside North Korea's missile systems argue the United States has no real alternative because the effort to stop North Korea from learning the secrets of making nuclear weapons has already failed. The only hope now is stopping the country from developing an intercontinental missile, and demonstrating that destructive threat to the world.
The Obama administration has taken an approach called the 'left of launch', which means they would disrupt and sabotage as many tests and launches as they can. In this way, they were avoiding any military action, any strikes, and avoiding the use of the option of providing Nuclear weapons to South Korea, which could have resulted in an arms race.
Clinton, as secretary of state, provided a report:
”North Korea's next goal may be to develop a mobile ICBM that would be capable of threatening targets around the world," said an October 2009 cable marked ”Secret" and signed by Mrs. Clinton.
The next year, one of the new missiles showed up in a North Korean military parade, just as the intelligence reports had warned.
Obama was increasingly disturbed:
In the last year of his presidency, Mr. Obama often noted publicly that the North was learning from every nuclear and missile test — even the failures — and getting closer to its goal. In private, aides noticed he was increasingly disturbed by North Korea's progress.
With only a few months left in office, he pushed aides for new approaches. At one meeting, he declared that he would have targeted the North Korean leadership and weapons sites if he thought it would work. But it was, as Mr. Obama and his assembled aides knew, an empty threat: Getting timely intelligence on the location of North Korea's leaders or their weapons at any moment would be almost impossible, and the risks of missing were tremendous, including renewed war on the Korean Peninsula.
Experts say this can't be a permanent or long term solutions, it could have serious consequences:
A decision to go after an adversary's launch ability can have unintended consequences, experts warn.
Once the United States uses cyberweapons against nuclear launch systems — even in a threatening state like North Korea — Russia and China may feel free to do the same, targeting fields of American missiles. Some strategists argue that all nuclear systems should be off-limits for cyberattack. Otherwise, if a nuclear power thought it could secretly disable an adversary's atomic controls, it might be more tempted to take the risk of launching a pre-emptive attack.
”I understand the urgent threat," said Amy Zegart, a Stanford University intelligence and cybersecurity expert, who said she had no independent knowledge of the American effort. ”But 30 years from now we may decide it was a very, very dangerous thing to do."
Trumps options:
Mr. Trump has signaled his preference to respond aggressively against the North Korean threat. In a Twitter post after Mr. Kim first issued his warning on New Year's Day, the president wrote, ”It won't happen!" Yet like Mr. Obama before him, Mr. Trump is quickly discovering that he must choose from highly imperfect options.
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He could order the escalation of the Pentagon's cyber and electronic war effort, but that carries no guarantees. He could open negotiations with the North to freeze its nuclear and missile programs, but that would leave a looming threat in place. He could prepare for direct missile strikes on the launch sites, which Mr. Obama also considered, but there is little chance of hitting every target. He could press the Chinese to cut off trade and support, but Beijing has always stopped short of steps that could lead to the regime's collapse.
In two meetings of Mr. Trump's national security deputies in the Situation Room, the most recent on Tuesday, all those options were discussed, along with the possibility of reintroducing nuclear weapons to South Korea as a dramatic warning. Trump administration officials say those issues will soon go to Mr. Trump and his top national security aides.
And what he may have chosen out of these options:
Mr. Trump's ”It won't happen!" post on Twitter about the North's ICBM threat suggests a larger confrontation could be looming.
”Regardless of Trump's actual intentions," James M. Acton, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently noted, ”the tweet could come to be seen as a ‘red line' and hence set up a potential test of his credibility."
