Where we're going, we don't need roads

Yesterday South-Korean and Japanese media reported that the DPRK launched two short-range ballistic missiles near its East Coast, both landing in the Sea of Japan. Today North Korean state media published pictures of both launches, as well as a video (courtesy of Dr. Tomohiko Kawaguchi) showing one of them. The missiles were launched from a train. During parades and previous launches, the North Koreans always liked to show off their tracked or wheeled launch vehicles, but despite their rugged looks, their mobility is likely to be hindered by the DPRK's poor road network. Reportedly, only about 800 km of the roads outside of urban areas are paved and many of them are in poor repair. However, the DPRK also has a 6000 km railway network, largely inherited from the Japanese occupation, with a lot of tunnels due to the rugged nature of the landscape. So, rail-basing makes a lot of sense. It's also not without precedent. Nazi-Germany experimented with rail based launchers for the V-2 missile, the Soviet Union / Russia operated the rail-based RT-23 Molodets (NATO name SS-24 "Scalpel") from 1987-2015 and even the US looked at rail-basing Minuteman ICBMs and later tested ICBM launching trains for the so-called "Peacekeeper Railway Garrison", until the program was cancelled in the early nineties.

The DPRK missiles launched yesterday look very similar to the ones the DPRK launched in May and July of 2019, also known as the "Unskander" because of their similarity to the Russian "Iskander" (SS-26 "Stone") short-range ballistic missile. They are much smaller than ICBMs, which means two of them can fit in a railway car that looks little different from a standard freight car, except for a few extra doors in the sides (for venting exhaust gasses), doors in the roof for launching the missiles, and supports that can be lowered onto the rails to prevent it from rocking on its suspension during launch operations.?