Alert: North Korea Now Capable Of Using Photoshop To Launch Missiles From Submarines

Whenever our friends in Pyongyang decide to troll the planet with one of their hilariously bad propaganda pieces, it always makes me wonder just how serious the North Korean regime is about this whole war thing. I mean, using video game footage and music to threaten 'Merica? C'mon, son. And those photoshopped photo-ops of your human-chicken-dumpling leader just don't inspire much confidence in the country's technological capabilities. But it's when North Korea combines war and fun-bad photoshopping that the real fun begins.

Take the country's recent press brag, for instance, in which North Korea announces that they've managed to launch a missile from a submarine.

Experts, it appears, aren't all that impressed with the photo. That was particularly the case when the state-run Pyongyang press circulated other photos of the launch that were complete with columns of smoke from the missile, columns of smoke conspicuously absent from the initial photo that was circulated above.

As Markus Schiller and Robert Schmucker, of Schmucker Technologie, told Reuters, “Considering the track record of North Korean deceptions, it seems sensible to assume that any North Korean SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] capability is still a very long time in the future, if it will ever surface.”

What the column-less photo lacked in smoke, it made up for with weird, poorly placed ocean smudges. That reddish patch of water you see to the left of the missile? That’s supposed to be the rocket’s reflection.

And, so, sadly, the only thing this launch report from North Korea tells us is that they still haven't gotten photoshop down. Oh well. If they ever did get into an actual shooting war again, I suppose they could always just photoshop themselves into some kind of victory pose. Given how often their progress with weapons technology turns out to be non-progress at photo-bullshitting, such a war is probably a remote possibility. Several of the commenters over at Gawker offered to help them out, of course, though this one is probably my favorite.

Call in Mario Marine!

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