This should be the link.

What happens if one does hit the land, whether intentional or not? It seems inevitable with that frequency. What would the response be?

False alarms create alarm fatigue. This can create more risk than it solves.

It might be wiser to:

1. Ignore specific occurrences to avoid giving the neighborhood narcissistic bully attention. Their ego uses this for oxygen.

2. Every few months, run preparedness drills for getting to strong shelters coinciding with testing the J-Alert system.

3. Only use the J-Alert system for a credible threat.

Classic alarm fatigue.

A frequent, nonspecific alert is completely worthless if it's not both credible and actionable.

> Does NK just get free reign to fire missiles towards other countries?

As long as North Korea's regional neighbors and the United States do little more than condemning the launches, yes. We know these launches pose a risk to civilians on the ground, but little can be done to stop them short of bombing the launch sites. And bombing North Korea would be an act of war, and the consequences would be unpredictable. [1] There are rumors that CYBERCOM has been able to stop North Korean missile launches in the past with covert cyberattacks, but whether that's true or not would be classified. [2]

If the U.S. wanted to respond in kind, it could launch a missile from a ship in the Sea of Japan. The missile could be programmed to overfly Pyongyang, and crash into the Yellow Sea. Though China would probably deploy watercraft to recover the missile's debris to study its technology, if it doesn't detonate.

[1] Note that North Korea did bomb the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong back in 2010 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong?uses...). Two civilians and two soldiers were killed, and a number of people were wounded, but the shelling did not trigger a conflict. North Korea also sank a South Korean warship the same year, killing 46, and it didn't cause a war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROKS_Cheonan_sinking?useskin=v...).

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-mi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/asia/north-korea-mi...

NK's rocketry program advancing at rapid rate. Look what where NK is, if they have to do flight tests, they're not going to fly over PRC, RU or SKR due to geopolitics. Sometimes they're sensible and do lofted trajectories into sea of Japan, but every once in a while they need to overfly some land for proper tests, and JP is what's left. Historic grievances a bonus. Extra bonus JP can't test/overfly back without landing in countries above. Geography of missile tests gets interesting, India has to do it over ocean where foreign sigint ships can gather data, US/RU/PRC all have large empty regions to test inland away from prying eyes.

According to BNO News, it did not (or will not) hit land: https://twitter.com/BNODesk/status/1646292786424033282

EDIT: NHK is now saying this as well via the original link

I hate seeing this on hacker news because there is the implication “it’s international news, so something must have happened”. I think the local alert probably has a more limited geographic scope than before, there’s been a lot of push back.

i guess they missed us: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20230413/k10014037081000.ht...

North Korea was doing this every week a while back

Japan has Patriot systems and several Aegis equipped ships, and both of those have ABM capability. Ballistic missiles are just much harder to shoot down than normal surface to surface or air launched missiles, especially when you’re using SAM’s like Patriot that are relatively short range. I think there just isn’t a very high confidence level in ABM systems. Even the US’ dedicated ABM system, which consists of long range missiles based in CA and AK, is expected to need four shots to achieve a 97% probability of kill (the system only has 44 missiles).

The US had a test platform [0] that showed that the concept of an airborne laser ABM system was viable. However they concluded that we need an order of magnitude increase in the power of airborne lasers in order for it to have enough range to actually be useful.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1

For starters, never believe any side's claims about how many of the other side's materiel/soldiers they've destroyed/killed/whatever. Russia is definitely telling bigger lies about this stuff, but the Ukrainians and their allies are certainly exaggerating their numbers too. In war, truth is the first casualty.

The reality is that we don't really have any hard numbers for how effective various missile defense systems are. Any test results from them are classified because you don't want your opponent knowing ahead of time how effective your defenses actually are. Even for automated turrets like CIWS don't have any hard numbers on their shootdown rate.

Japan as AEGIS + SM3 with dedicated ballistic missile defense ships in the plan. Issue is BMD are really not well tested, intercept tests are very choreographed events that is not... reflective of reality, and still experiences occasional failures. I think JP conducts there tests with USN around Hawaii, away from prying eyes. Apart from just being sensitive tech where you don't want capabilities revealed (which it will if intercepting in sea of Japan), the political optics of FAILING to intercept is catastrophic. IMO worse than a F35 getting shot down. Imagine interceptor (missile) misses / fails to self destruct and lands in SKR (if lucky), or if unlucky, in nuclear states like PRC, RU, NKR where an incoming missile defense interceptor is not distinguishable from an actual missile. Basically, current BMD politics is better to pretend/hope you're capable (via controlled demostrations) than fail once while doing it live and remove all doubt.

They're not worth it to actually use unless you have unlimited amounts of money or you know there's a nuke on the missile.

It would take in the ballpark of $10 billion worth of anti-missile systems to shoot down $100 million worth of unarmed ballistic missiles if both sides know what their doing.

These missiles are in outer space, at the altitude of the ISS or higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_Korean_missile_t... (*old* ICBM tests, not today's one)

- There's no extant technology to shoot them down;

- They're not in Japanese airspace or territory (does not extend to orbital altitude);

- If they were to crash in Japan by mistake, there's no benefit in shooting at them, because they'd be untargeted debris with no warheads. An anti-missile missile is just additional debris with extra steps.

> half or more

Here is the answer. Every system has some percentage of misses, especially during mass attacks.

Iron Dome is not really relevant, I think, it's designed against small, short-range, mortar-like projectiles. For ballistic rockets or cruise missiles you need systems like Patriot, right.

"technologically advanced country like Japan?"

is unfortunately a misconception

Growing up in Bulgaria, in the 80s, live was easy and happy. Why? You did not have to think much about your future, finish high-school (required), get to university (free) or find a decent technical job. No complicated taxes, loans. Not much choice at the store - 2 kinds of everything - 2 kinds of beers, cheese, salami (well kind of). You look around - almost everyone is like you, maybe 2x less, maybe 2x more salary, some x10 - but you don't see them.

Everyone was like a well sized job running in k8s or nomad :) - because the goverment was like that. It's much easier to compertmenalize such people...

Now we are not "jobs" or "tasks" or "peons", we are people. So there was oppression, but it was hidden. People would joke, but then people might tell other people to the "secret service police".

As a kid, I had pretty good childhood! But still not sure if I had to be an adult during that period how I would've felt.

A recent Ipsos survey showed that China was the country with the highest proportion of happy people, at 91%.[1]

A 2020 survey by Harvard researchers showed similar results. [2]

People living in autocracies are far less dissatisfied with their systems of government as democracy minded Westerners like myself might assume.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en/global-happiness-six-points-last-ye...

[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-sur...

All of the above, same as any country.

Well, everyone has to be somewhere

Everyone has a phone these days, and every phones has emergency alerts enabled by default. You'll get notices in any actual "hits the fan" situations.

There have been at least three American missile tests that landed in Mexico. (They were launched from the US into the US, intended to land in the White Sands missile range, but overshot).

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1350&dat=19700804&id=... ("Mexcians find errant rocket", 1970)

https://wsmrmuseum.com/2021/11/10/in-1970-an-athena-missile-... ("In 1970, An Athena Missile Went Deep Into Mexico")

That's a really good question. Is 9/11 a good historical analogy for millennials? Is there something better to relate this to?