Where's Kimmie's Missile?

Today came news that North Korea's insatiably cukoo regime might be in the final stages of planning a test of a long-range missile that could reach the U.S.--assuming, that is, that our nation's always-reliable, top-of-the-line missle defense system doesn't blow it out of the air first. That's alarming enough, and yet, given the vagaries of Kim Jong-Il, not too surprising either.

What's more interesting here is not so much that North Korea's leader is more batshit than Britney on a bad day, but what North Korea's missile program says about the posturing that constitutes the nation's--and by extension, Kim's--notion of its power. In reality, it appears that North Korea, despite its ambitions, is playing with a very weak hand to a table of international players who long ago called its bluff. It's clear in almost all the evidence gathered so far about the North Korean program that it lacks so much in technology and scale as to pose nary a threat to anyone--at least not anyone in the U.S. For Japan and China the threat is considerably greater, of course; even a missle made of toothpicks and powered by an onboard coal furnace could get that far in the hands of a few adequately-trained physicists. This site paints a decent picture of how ramshackle the North Korean missile project is, though the dossier is admittedly a bit dated.

Whatever its technical flaws, though, North Korea's missile is an interesting story. Which begs the question: Why didn't the New York Times article tell us where, exactly, the missile test site is? All we get is that it's "a site in North Korea's remote east coast." Given the geopolitical significance of the test site, I think most readers would want to know as much as possible about this place--where it is, what it looks like, who's there, how shipments are made. I may be mistaken, but I think most readers favor concrete details on the geographical origins of a missile threat over abstractions like "North Korea's remote east coast," a hackneyed bit of journalese that does as much to place the site and describe it as saying New York City is somewhere in the densely-populated northeast.

I did some looking around and I think I've come up with a satellite image from Google maps of the launchpad in question (tell me if this is the wrong one). The shadow of a launch tower is clearly visible pointing north. I can't quite figure out what the source of the shadow that criss-crosses the tower is. It may be merely a depression in the earth. If anyone has any more details, please comment.