Getting What You Paid For

Here’s what our aid to North Korea has bought us them:

North Korea has built a new ballistic missile launch pad, at Musudan-ri on the northeast coast, with an underground fueling system that makes it much easier to prepare one of their multistage ballistic missiles for launch. Prep time can be reduced from 4-5 days to 1-2 days. Previously, the missile would be surrounded by fuel trucks, special equipment and technical personnel before launch. But now most of that is hidden from view. Thus, with so much of the launch preparation underground, space satellites see less obvious signs of an impending launch. The Musudan-ri facility was completed in the last month.

Maybe what we should have done was cut China, Japan, Russia and South Korea out of this wildly successful process, and instead gone in for some of those “tough, direct,” personal negotiations President Obama keeps promising.

Nah.