Passers-by receive an extra newspaper reporting North Korea's rocket launch in Tokyo on Sunday.
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Passers-by receive an extra newspaper reporting North Korea's rocket launch in Tokyo on Sunday.
© Japan Today
9 Comments
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shonanbb
Why did we not shoot it down?
Why was this extra special newspaper put out 6 hours late?
some14some
Seemingly a cool response !
nath
I'd guess it wasn't shot down because it wasn't going to make landfall, so they didn't want to expose their defence capabilities to the Koreans.
smithinjapan
Shonanbb: "Why did we not shoot it down?"
You already asked this. Because you'd miss and prove the failure of Japan's defense, so they didn't risk it. Besides, they haven't even been able to track it past the first stage.
"why was this extra special newspaper put out 6 hours late?"
Takes time to print, for one. Also, it's Japanese media we're talking about, which relies on pretty unreliable alert methods. And lest we forget, in a test of the national alert system the other day, no one even knew it was even being tested. The media was probably also confirming before it went to print given how often they mistake launches.
In any case, I see the papers have reduced themselves to calling it a "missile" again instead of a rocket. I doubt they call the shut down of the H2 Rocket program the H2 "missile" program, so no hogwash excuses about how anything that flies is technically a missile.
Moonraker
"Kowai, ne."
SenseNotSoCommon
Yes, thanks for scaring us all, Yomiuri Shimbun.
turbotsat
Shot down it might land on something instead of reaching orbit. Also it probably wasn't close enough to shoot.
Also the Defense Ministry PAC-3's are on the north side of the building in Tokyo, they'd have to go through the building to hit a missile over Okinawa.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot
Re "also it probably wasn't close enough to shoot", according to this launch trajectory graph predicting older DPRK orbital launches, when the rocket was above Okinawa, 1493 km from the launch site, it was already 500 km high. The max PAC-3 range is 35 km.
Seoul is 300 km from the launch site and the rocket was still too high at that point for a PAC-3 to hit, around 250 km high, according to the graph:
http://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/images/nwgs/unha-2-3-trajectories.jpg
Yubaru
Funny thing is that I'll bet that just about everyone with a smart-phone or cell phone that has the emergency warning app set up knew about this at 9:35AM.
I was waiting for a lecture to start at 9:45 AM in a room with about 120 people in it and at 9:35 or so it seemed like everyone's smart-phones and keitei's were chiming all at once, then again at around 9:40.
It wasn't, the special editions were on the streets in about within a couple of hours. The picture was posted 6 hours later. (There corrected that for ya')
shonanbb
Thanks