10 March 2003

It is the coffee that is getting me up this morning, the electrons are firing, all right, but not hitting on all the cylinders yet. The week beckons, ready or not, eager to run down to the riverbank of crisis and plunge right in.

The North Koreans fired a missile this morning to greet the new week. It wasn't much of a missile, mind you, even the Japanese said it wasn't ballistic and not a threat to the home islands. The media is reporting that what the North shot was an anti-ship missile, the kind they roll out of hardened cave structures to prepared launch pads. l. If memory serves, that means it was probably an SS-N-2B anti-ship cruise missile, a type that has proliferated around the world. The NATO code-name of it was STYX, after the mythical river of death, where Charon steered the boat to the netherworld. It is a popular model with second-tier nations of limited budgets with coastlines or chokepoints to protect.

The Koreans have them, of course, and other weasel-governments like Iran. Even Somalia had some, I think, not that they could keep them up. They were delivered and began immediately to corrode. Liquid-fueled they were, the size of an elongated Lincoln Navigator. Big radar cross-section. Not at all stealthy. Very 1950s. There have been technical improvements on the amount of fuel they carry and the seeker. Maximum range on the latest iterations of this Soviet-era weapon is around 60 miles. I assume the busy Northerners have reverse engineered them, or the Chinese did, just part of the proliferation of ugly things that leaked out of the big arms race.

For most of the production run the range was not much more than the curve of the earth, around 30 miles. Not that it couldn't ruin your day if you weren't ready for it, minding your own business on the mid-watch on a slow merchant ship.

So why this is a big deal is beyond me, the Russians used to cook these things off all the time. It is just part of a media circus that surrounds the continuing crisis. So many things leaked out, even the ones that were really big secrets in their time. The nasty ones.

I would rather have a lingering coffee this morning, and wonder how I would fill the day if it was up to me. I would much rather have it that way than have it filled up for me by an impatient world, eager to get to the Rubicon. Or take a long ride down the River Styx.

Vic