After years of threatening to burn the United States in a sea of fire, North Korea is on the verge of having an intercontinental ballistic missile -- an ICBM -- capable of hitting the American homeland with a thermonuclear warhead. The missile is called the Hwasong -- which translates to Mars, the Roman God of War.
North Korea's brash, young dictator Kim Jong Un is not there yet and will need several more tests before he has a weapon he can count on. Still, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs calls it the greatest threat facing the U.S. today. Defense Secretary James Mattis went to the DMZ two days ago and vowed to stand with South Korea against the north.
Tracking that threat, and helping to come up with defenses against it, is the job of the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, NASIC for short, located near Dayton, Ohio. If you've never heard of NASIC, that's because television news cameras have never been inside its operations center -- until now.
On any given day at NASIC more than 100 photo interpreters, engineers, rocket scientists and intelligence analysts are poring through reams of data collected every time North Korea launches a missile. Last summer, the North Korean threat went to a whole new level, says NASIC Commander Col. Sean Larkin.
Col. Sean Larkin: They demonstrated the ability that they could reach the continental United States.
David Martin: The lower 48?
Col. Sean Larkin: Yes.
There were two tests -- one on July 4 and again on July 28. Both were launched at a very high angle, so they did not go far out to sea. But once NASIC crunched the numbers there was no doubt had one of those missiles been fired on a standard trajectory it could have reached California and beyond.
Col. Sean Larkin: Math is our secret weapon So there's lots of things that go into an ICBM or other types of weapons systems that simply -- even if we don't have the pieces of the puzzle we can do the math and figure out what's missing.
Jeremy Suel and his team of analysts produced a computer simulation of North Korea's ICBM.
Jeremy Suel: Well, this is the actual code that we develop.
David Martin: So, can you take me through what this would look like on a flight?
This is the God of War, North Korea's intercontinental ballistic missile.
Jeremy Suel: The first stage of the system is there to get it off the ground, get initial motion. But then it will drop that stage.
After the Hwasong 14's engines have sent it into space all that is left is the re-entry vehicle. A warhead would be inside as gravity pulls it back to Earth.
Jeremy Suel: You're at the mercy of the atmosphere at that point. You're slamming into it at many, thousands of miles per hour, so that will have tremendous forces imparted on the, the reentry vehicle.
David Martin: And what kind of temperatures are we talking about?
Jeremy Suel: Many thousands of degrees.
North Korea cannot attack the U.S. with a nuclear weapon until it develops a reentry vehicle that can stand that kind of heat.
Hugh Griffiths is head of the team which monitors the North Korean missile program for the U.N. Security Council. He says pictures released by the regime last year were an attempt to prove it had already succeeded. A reentry vehicle was subjected to a rocket engine blast.