• Kim Jong Un’s sister said North Korea is ready to test-fire an ICBM.
• A flight path that could show the weapons can strike the continental US.
• Kim Yo Jong dismissed ICBM doubts.

North Korea is prepared to test-fire an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at a normal trajectory, the sister of leader Kim Jong Un said on Tuesday in official television, a flight path that could show the weapons can strike the continental United States.

Kim Yo Jong, the highest official in her brother’s government, disregarded analysts’ doubts about North Korea’s ICBM technology advancements, particularly on the reentry capabilities of its warheads, in a statement carried by the Korean news agency.

ICBMs are launched into space, where they travel quickly beyond the atmosphere before their payloads—nuclear warheads—experience a fiery reentry process, similar to that of a space shuttle or space capsule, before crashing down on their targets.

The warhead would burn up before reaching its target if the process isn’t carried out with extreme precision and with materials that can survive the intense heat produced.

The operation might be made more challenging by the angle at which the warhead reenters the atmosphere.

Ballistic missiles fired by North Korea have so far travelled hundreds of miles into space before entering the atmosphere at a sharp angle and most of them have landed in oceans between North Korea and Japan.

A North Korean missile would need to follow a far shallower flight path and reenter the atmosphere at a much shallower angle in order to successfully target the US mainland.

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