According to many nuclear defense experts, the U.S. would be unwise to put too much confidence in its missile defense systems. In an interview with The New York Post, physicist David Wright of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists said that our best missile defense technology has only a 50% success rate. And even that rate is only under test conditions, which would be unlikely to be replicated in the event of an actual strike.

“You simply wouldn’t rely on it,” Wright told the Post. “It has been tested 18 times in the last 12 to 15 years, and even under the controlled circumstances of tests, it has failed half the times.”

Under a 50% success rate, even, North Korea would only have to launch two or three simultaneous missiles to be practically guaranteed a successful strike. And with a leader in charge who habitually issues warnings to major East Coast cities like Washington and New York, such an attack cannot be automatically discounted. If Kim Jong Un feels as though he must choose between being deposed and subjecting his people to total annihilation, he may very well choose the latter. He has not, after all, allowed their suffering to dissuade him from the nuclear proliferation program.

Other nuclear experts, including Lawrence Krauss, have said much the same thing as Wright about U.S. missile defense systems. They say it provides Americans with little more than a false sense of security, getting us to believe that we would be relatively safe in the face of a nuclear strike. This, of course, is abject nonsense, even if our defense systems are better than the cynics believe. It only takes one missile to threaten a major U.S. city, and there’s certainly no system on the planet that can guard against every possible eventuality.

These warnings make it all the more important for President Trump to work with our allies – and even our detractors, like China and Russia – to find a way to bring an end to Kim Jong Un’s reign of terror. It is clearer than ever that the North Korean dictator is serious about developing and maintaining a dangerous nuclear arsenal, and these weapons simply cannot be in the hands of an unstable lunatic like the man who runs Pyongyang.