Thread by @dex_eve

North Korea has launched an SRBM from a recently dug silo at the Sohae Space Launch Center. Some important implications:

North Korea is threatened with a myriad of fast or stealthy South Korean and American systems that can accurately strike targets in the DPRK in under five minutes. There are two possible solutions to this problem, and the DPRK is experimenting with both of them.

The first is mobility. You can put your missiles on trucks and drive them around making adversary targeting much more difficult, aiding the survivability of your missile systems, giving them time to retaliate.

The second is simply matching speed for speed. Solid-fueled missiles in silos are fast. No need to fuel them, they're already in launch position, all you need to do is press a button and they're off.

So now we have two adversaries on the peninsula, both experimenting with extremely fast missile systems, in the DPRK case, that are nuclear-capable, and both have plans to launch disarming first strikes against the other.

You should be able to start seeing the problem here. Silos also have the advantage that the adversary can't detect launch preparations. They can be launched with no warning.

If the DPRK deploys such a system at scale, the pressure for the ROK and US to strike first in a crisis will be immense, as will the DPRK's desire to maximize damage by striking with little warning.

Lastly, we should take note of how quickly the DPRK built this thing. They started breaking ground on the silo itself in late January. The deployment time is less than 60 days. That's really concerning.

It means that North Korea could build and deploy SRBM silos armed with nuclear missiles out in the northern parts of the country extremely quickly. They could also build a lot of decoy silos if they wanted, further complicating ROK/US targeting.

The bottom line here is that I think we are on the brink of seeing a pretty huge expansion in the DPRK nuclear SRBMs, presenting a lot of problems for the peninsula during a nuclear crisis.