North Korea got 2017 off to a menacing start. In his New Year's address , supreme leader Kim Jong Un warned that the nation was in the "final stage" of preparations to test an intercontinental ballistic missile . A day later, President-elect Donald Trump said the North would never develop a nuclear weapon capable of striking the U.S. "It won't happen!" Trump tweeted . Bombast aside, independent arms control experts agree that North Korea is moving rapidly to develop an ICBM. And many suspect it will test a missile capable of reaching the continental U.S. later this year. "They are very far along in their ICBM testing project," says Melissa Hanham , an East Asia researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. "Probably we will see that they will do a flight test in 2017." If the test were successful — a big if — North Korea would join a small club of nations with ICBMs, including superpowers like the U.S., Russia and China. North Korea is a notoriously
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