JUST how sophisticated is the rocket that North Korea has announced it will launch in April?
The nation has warned shipping away from two “dangerous zones” in the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean between 4 and 8 April, which probably mark the expected splashdown sites of the rocket’s stages (see map).
David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has taken these zones and sketched out one possible rocket consistent with them, assuming that it burns kerosene and nitric acid, as the nation’s previous rockets are thought to have done.
It has a mass…
