Greetings from the old #nukefest2013.
For my regular column at Foreign Policy last week, I pondered the meaning of Kim Jong Un’s Map of Death. In that post, I made some simple estimates of the four targets:
If one has but four targets to select, these four reflect a certain logic. North Korea is targeting both the national and theater leadership in Washington and Hawaii, as well as major U.S. military installations for naval operations (San Diego) and either long-range bomber missions (if it is Barksdale) or cyberattacks (if it is Lackland).
I really wasn’t sure about that fourth target — Barksdale or Lackland. When everyone thought it was Austin, I thought it might be Lackland near San Antonio. I was wrong. We now have two unobstructed images of the map, I am reasonably certain the fourth target Barksdale Air Force Base near Shreveport, Lousiana.
It is relatively simply to try and trace the lines ending in the four targets.
The problem, of course, is Lt. Gen. Kim Rak Gyom’s kepi. His damned hat is in the way.
Now, however, North Korean state TV has broadcast two additional images that show the unobstructed map. These are available on YouTube. That gives us three shots of the map:
The two new pictures are sort of blurry, but the good news is that the crease on the map is eminently visible, which helps bound the possibilities.
Based on the new images, along with a high resolution version of the original, I think we can conclude with a relatively high degree of confidence that the line continues behind General Kim’s hat. There was some circumstantial evidence for this — in the high resolution version of the original image, one can see what appear to be arrowheads on the lines that terminate in Hawaii, South California and the District of Columbia. No such arrowhead is visible for the fourth and last line, although there seems to be a lot of blurry text on the map that jumbles things up.
The relative positions of three targets — lets call them Oahu, San Diego and Washington, DC — check out against each other and allow us to infer the location of the fourth target. The fact that the lines also trace back to North Korea is a nice sanity check. Here is an overlay — apologies for the vintage map, but it seems to be the closest match to the projection used by the North Koreans.
The mystery line would appear to end near Shreveport, Louisana, home of Barksdale Air Force Base, Air Force Global Strike Command and Steele Means. That’s a little easier to see on a contemporary map of the United States.
This method is pretty rough. But I’ve repeated it several times with many maps. There are limits to self-reporting, but my experience is that multiple iterations of this exercise results in a cluster of results around Shreveport.
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Again, I think the targets are pretty straightforward. Washington DC and PACOM are national and theater leadership targets. (Pearl Harbor is also homeport to the USS Cheyenne.) San Diego is the principal homeport of the Pacific Fleet (and the USS Decatur) and Barksdale is the home of Air Force Global Strike command.
It is interesting that Omaha gets a pass, as does Whiteman Air Force Base.