When North Korea last year bragged of plans to lob a salvo of ballistic missiles toward Guam, residents of this relaxed American island in the western Pacific didn’t seem too worried. Months later, and with tensions still high, they remain sanguine.
“We know that if anything was to happen, there would be a lot of efforts to keep us safe and make sure we aren’t hit by anything,” says Blake Bristol, manager of Mosa’s Joint diner in the capital Hagatna. “We are just going to hang out and enjoy the time that we have. If it happens, it happens — that’s how it is.”
Though Guam is US territory and home to more than 160,000 people, few Americans give the island much thought — and even fewer will ever visit. But it briefly came to prominence last year amid a flurry of North Korea weapons tests.
In a moment of red-hot tension after two intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches by Pyongyang — which prompted President Donald Trump to vow “fire and fury” in response — the North said it was considering sending missiles toward Guam.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un hasn’t followed through, but officials insist they could have stopped the threat — and residents are just getting on with their lives.
“The general populace feels like they under the protection of the US government,” says another local, Vincent Terlaje.
Residents have good reason to be calm —dozens of radars dot the tropical island’s clifftops and nearby fields, scanning for signals and potential threats. Guam hosts a sophisticated anti-missile system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD), which is designed to fire interceptors into an incoming intermediate-range rocket and pulverise the target. “There is no better defended place to be than Guam,” Navy Lieutenant Ian McConnaughey boasts as he shows reporters around Andersen Air Force Base, a sprawling facility carved from the island’s dense tropical brush.
McConnaughey is one of more than 7,000 US military personnel stationed on Guam, which juts out of the world’s deepest ocean and is part of the remote Mariana Islands chain. Though it is located some 3,400km southeast of North Korea, Guam in some ways represents a front line in America’s standoff with Pyongyang. It is part of the military’s gigantic Pacific Command (PACOM), a region spanning almost half the globe. General Joe Dunford — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who recently visited the island with a group of journalists —and other US officials vehemently disagree with that assertion. The B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, shaped like a jagged boomerang, is deployed here — it can carry nuclear payloads and evade radar.
Officials on the base wheeled out a better known plane for Dunford’s inspection — the imposing B-52 Stratofortress, a Cold War behemoth that still forms part of America’s bomber fleet backbone. “We are the third generation to fly this plane, which is incredible,” 28-year-old Captain Joseph Trench Niez says. With THAAD and its network of ship- and ground-based interceptors that can in theory take out an ICBM, the Pentagon says it can stop any threat from North Korea.
But America’s defences are by no means guaranteed and the calculus is always changing.
Tourists board on a shuttle bus near the tourist resorts in Tamuning on the island of Guam in this file picture.
