This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, July 26, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

North Korea fired missiles in what the country is called a solemn warning to the south for U.S. a Cato's Eric Gomez comments. From one perspective we could look at this launch and say,

well, this is the same old provocation that we've seen from North Korea time and time again.

They just have the newer technology with which to make these kinds of provocations.

And another is to say, well, this is completely unprecedented. is a new new chapter in the the fight over

North Korea and their attempt to get nuclear weapons and presumably there's another way to look at it which is

North Korea would like to be able to defend itself they'd like to be taken seriously

in the global stage and this is a step toward achieving that. So which one is, which one do you view is most accurate or is there one that I'm, is there something

I'm missing?

I think all of those have a little bit of truth to them.

There's definitely an aspect here of wanting to maximize North Korea's leverage and position going into talk to the United States.

It doesn't seem like they're doing this in an effort to get diplomacy to break down.

Rather, they want to do it to put pressure on the US and especially to put pressure on South Korea and to say we don't like you guys doing these military exercises and we want you to stop them.

You promised to do so earlier and so since you aren't living up to our your promises we're not going to be bound by our own sort of

promises that we made to you to not test things. So I think that that explains a lot of what's going on here. The

other sort of explanations of you know in terms of defense capability yeah I think

that this missile system is one that is going to be used

with conventional units, not nuclear-armed ones. The missile itself, based off of its sort of

payload capacity and general size and how similar missiles are used by other militaries, you know, yes, if North Korea were able to get a nuclear warhead small enough and light enough sure they could put it on it

But if you look at the people who observe the tests and also the way North Korea talks about the system

It seems more likely to be used for a conventional

mission.

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