Korea Tensions Lead To Delay Of Minuteman III Test Flight 256
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. plans on delaying 'the test of the Minuteman III intercontinental missile' that was scheduled for launching next week out of the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The reported reason is to prevent 'misperception or miscalculation' by North Korea. North Korea has warned foreign diplomats that 'they could not guarantee their safety from next Wednesday' onwards, but the warning has not caused any plans for evacuation of any embassies so far."
here's my prediction (Score:4, Funny)
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If this were true, there would be no reason for Kim to trust the CIA, if the regime falls, they'd deny all knowledge / feed him to the wolves.
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Re:here's my prediction (Score:5, Funny)
yes, because in a country of 24+ million it is impossible to find a body double
Kim Jong Un is a fat boy. Fat folks are in short supply in North Korea.
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Even now, Lockheed scientists are working full 8-hour days in a crash plan to develop a fat-seeking missile.
Their testing is slowed by the need to find a test site well away from a Wal-Mart.
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Fat folks are in short supply in North Korea.
But are they in... high demand? :p
Makes sense (Score:2)
They are just saving it up for a real target, which could up come pretty soon. Those things aren't cheap.
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What's cheaper than and more efficient than fighting wars?
To not do it.
Opportunity Cost (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to ask yourself...what is the cost of not going to war against North Korea now.
Do you want to wait to be certain that he has not only nuclear capability and also medium range missile capability but the ability to launch medium range missiles with nuclear warheads (which may not currently be the case) ?
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You are starting to understand how they feel about you. That is the real problem here. They can't just abandon their long range nuclear weapons programme because it is the only thing protecting them. They have to play this dangerous game.
I don't know what the solution is. I know what it isn't though: military intervention.
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You are starting to understand how they feel about you. That is the real problem here. They can't just abandon their long range nuclear weapons programme because it is the only thing protecting them. They have to play this dangerous game.
I don't know what the solution is. I know what it isn't though: military intervention.
Just. Plain. Stupid.
Being obnoxious but someplace nobody much cares about was the only safety NK ever had. Being obnoxious and waving around nukes will get people, even their nominal protector, China, thinking hard about how to flatten them before they do something unfortunate.
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On the other side of the scale is an extremely weighty counter-question:
Can the USA afford another ground invasion and the regime change + nation building that would follow?
The answer to that is unequivocally "No"
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It's a good question, but I feel it's an odd one for a Slashdotter to have posted.
1.) The United States is a part of an international community that would look down upon us for taking aggressive and provocative measures, even toward a nutcase.
(Is he a nutcase if he becomes a hero to his people by standing up to the US? There is a reason why he is doing what he is doing.)
2.) North Korea and China are allies, at this point, and it would be prudent to make sure that is not the case if the US must take action.
U
40 year old tech (Score:2)
though they have "upgraded" bits and pieces of the originals over the years. Have to wonder whether it would have been cheaper to deploy a newer missile than continue to fuck around with retrofits (and for another 20 years based on current plans).
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Some things work to the point where if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The orignal designs are near-optimal for the intended role, and what few updates there are tend to be minor improvements. For instance the B-52s are another weapons platform that has been kept going for years longer than expected, and the A-10 may also end up extended as there's no good replacement able to do its job.
As for the missiles, solid fuel missiles don't have much in the way of moving parts. The missiles should be reliable provide
ob. yeah, whatever (Score:5, Funny)
"Kim..." ::CHOMP!::
"WHAT?"
"Eat your Snickers."
"WHY!?"
"'Cos you turn into a right megalomaniac when you're hungry."
"...Better?"
"Oppa Gangnam Syle!"
US = bankrupt and can't afford 3 occupations ... (Score:2)
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you're confused, exporting war, weapons and death is the business model. we'll go bankrupt if we *don't* do that
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the presence is part of the export and the business model really is working, who's economy is in better shape than the US?
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Welcome tourists! (Score:2)
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it would be much better to simply allow things to settle down and let the little tyrant continue the deathcamp conditions prevalent throughout NK.
Either that or we should let him have the first shot. Because that would be the responsible thing to do, right?
(Do we really want him firing off his dirty bombs into SK, Japan, or who knows where else? )
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There are political concerns. The impact on the world perception of the US, which is already getting a nasty reputation for unprovoked invasions of dubious justification following Afganistan and Iraq. Then there is the impact on the careers of politicians too - even though defeating NK's military would be a piece of cake, you'd still be left with a decade-long insurgency requiring expensive peacekeeping operations costing many billions of dollars in a time of financial crisis. Now is not a time anyone in th
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No this isn't like Iraq, I seriously doubt there'd be any insurgency since North and South Korea are culturally very similar, speak the same language, and are the same people basically. Once the usual postwar troublespots quiet down, it would be "free TVs for everyone", there aren't any major religious schisms or historical reasons for North and South to hate one another beyond the recent unpleasantness.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
You seem to underestimate 60+ years of uninterrupted regime propaganda.
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The propaganda fell apart quickly enough in the Eastern European bloc and East Germany. I know it wasn't quite as severe as NK but I'd expect similar results.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Interesting)
No one in Eastern Europe really liked communism or Russian rule.
They were puppet states with little if any popular backing.
Regimes like Cuba, Vietnam, and NK, are regimes that did have, at least at one point popular backing, and were founded by charismatic leaders viewed as heros, because the people knew FAR worse than the regimes that got set up there.
Cuba - if you read history you knew cuba was never a democracy, Batistas regime was far worse than Castros. The revolution that Castro fought wasn't even communist until a few years after the revolution, after the US denounced it, and they needed political backing.
Vietnam - was lead by Ho Chi Min. He was fighting a gureilla war against the French before WW2, the Japanese durring WW2, and the French again after WW2. He was a US ally in ww2 against the Japaneese. He expected the US to help vietnam get indepedence after the war, they didn't, so he went to Russia and turned against the US. Still the constitution of Vietnam has very similar pre-amble and rhetoric to our own. The regime in the south was held together by nothing but the US Government, and fell apart when we abandonded it in 1973.
North Korea - Kim Il-Sung, the founder, like Ho Chi Min, was another anti-Japaneese insurgent in WW2, and extremely popular for fending of the Japaneese in WW2, this cemented his popularity. NK is isolated from the outside so no one in NK has any idea of the rest of the world beyond what they are told. They just know who saved them from the Japaneese in WW2. Visitors are carefully screened and chaparoned.
NK is also NOT a sattelite state of any other regime at current, as hard as it is to believe. They remained hardline stallinist durring China's "cultural revolution", and breshnev's liberalism, and later the fall of the USSR. Their policy of self-reliance and isolation has fended off Russian and Chineese reform policies at whrecking their once vibrant economy.
They have this massive army, and experts disagree with what state of repair their ancient military vehicles are in.
Which is entirely irrelivant because they do not have the fuel to power even a 1/3rd of their force for a signifigant amount of time, nor does any of it stack up to the latest NATO equivilants.
Further adding to the mix, is the rugged mountains of NK, making tank warfare almost worthless, along with most other armored vehicles. A battle with NK would be determined with infantry. NK's 120,000 strong special forces/light infantry corps being the only formation we really have to worry about, and their vast networks of tunnels.
These requires really little if any infastructure support, as they will steal provisions and equipment from the enemy, and try and infiltrate deep inside enemy lines.
Its also unlikely that if NK tries and nuke someone, it will not be done with missiles. It would be carried by these special forces by hand, and detonated in place.
Also, read more H. John Poole. He'll explain most of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._John_Poole
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You seem to underestimate 60+ years of uninterrupted regime propaganda.
And you seem to underestimate the inertia of centuries of culture. And to really underestimate the power of getting some nutritious food and knowing that some of your family is no longer spending the rest of their miserable lives in one of NK's versions of a Stalinist death/labor camp.
SK would have to dig deep, just like West Germany did. But the long term benefits would be huge for them, financially, culturally, and morally. Just like it was for a re-unified Germany.
None of this will happen, of cour
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And to really underestimate the power of getting some nutritious food and knowing that some of your family is no longer spending the rest of their miserable lives in one of NK's versions of a Stalinist death/labor camp.
History over the past half century shows that America isn't real good at this part. In all the countries we've worked to "liberate," from Vietnam to Iraq, we generally do so at immense cost to civilian architecture: what little they already had of agriculture, clean water, electricity, sanitation gets reduced to rubble; disease and starvation kill far more than our direct bombings. I doubt North Koreans will come to love us for food and freedom, because we've shown zero capability of actually improving food
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But the last whole century tells a different story. The rebulding of Europe and Japan after WWII went well in the areas which were under Allied control after the war, due largely to the Marshall Plan in Europe and US directed changes to governance in Japan. And S. Korea was in the same state as N. Korea at the end of armed hostilities in 1953 -- they have turned out rather well. Vietnam doesn't count in this analysis because the US lost that war and wasn't available to help rebuild. The Iraq fiasco to a
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All right, so Vietnam "doesn't count" because we didn't win --- even though, if we had, we'd still have already destroyed nearly all their dams and irrigation systems, and doused the whole country in carcinogenic defoliants, so I can't see the outcome being a lot more rosy after that point.
But, just so you don't think Bush's bungling in Iraq is an isolated incident of failed US "helpfulness," why don't you read up on the history of a few more countries where we've "helped out," including Cambodia, East Timo
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None of this will happen, of course. Because China doesn't want what amounts to a prosperous Germany right next door.
Yes, they do. That would be huge for their trading prospects. What they don't want is the US military entanglement that comes with South Korea.
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you're there because it's the closest to China you can be without starting a war.
No, we're there because China started a war. And their proxy in that war (North Korea) insists its still on.
Oh yes, the usual "world's saviours and protectors" rethoric...
So, what has your country done to prevent NK from rolling into SK? What did it do when they first tried, and what has it done since? If the US is just faking it, in terms of protecting SK from the north, there must be someone else doing the actual work. That would be you, I guess?
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to underestimate 60+ years of uninterrupted regime propaganda.
+5 Insightful?
Let me tell you as someone living in Korea that there is zero question here about whether or not North Korea wants to blow Seoul. I'll give you a hint -- they wouldn't drop bombs on Seoul even if the US was nuking Pyongyang.
While the North has been a separate country for a long time at this point, the people on the two sides of the DMZ do not at all consider each other enemies. The rhetoric from the North about destroying the South is firmly directed at the South Korean government.
People have a racial unity here that you can probably not even imagine. Here's an attempt at an analogy. Would the Israelis bomb a city of 100% Jews?
The North considers the people in the South to be essentially captive by a traitorous government that's being dictated behind the scenes by the US and other foreign influences. They want to 'liberate' their relatives and their people, not bomb them into dust because they don't like what they consider to be a minority of them who are oppressing the rest.
I know the story about the artillery within range of Seoul makes a good scare piece, but there's zero chance they will be wantonly killing all the South Koreans just because it's technically a separate country.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Interesting)
Btw, Living in South Korea doesn't mean anything. I live in South Korea too and I'd beg to differ with your position.
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...and you're not sharp enough to understand that the purpose of this propaganda is to turn the South Korean people against its government (thereby weakening it, and by extension weakening the SK military) & lull these same citizens into a false sense of security.
The North would like nothing better than to conquer the South, and would not hesitate to kill mass numbers on both sides to do it. The North's elites don't even care about their own peoples' lives or the quality thereof; they will have even fe
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
I know the story about the artillery within range of Seoul makes a good scare piece, but there's zero chance they will be wantonly killing all the South Koreans just because it's technically a separate country.
Because they didn't kill any South Koreans in the Korean war right?
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since North and South Korea are culturally very similar, speak the same language, and are the same people basically
I'm sorry, but you seem to be extremely uninformed. Their language isn't completely different, but it differs enough that a North Korean would only understand about 60% of what a South Korean says [wikipedia.org].
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Well, I don't think Kim wants to die. The guy is barely 30.
If you really want to invade North Korea you first have to immobilize and disable their 1M+ strong army so you don't have to fight a tower defense-like battle against a virtually never ending onslaught of semi-fast moving troops. You don't want to give the North Koreans a chance to take the initiative and go on the offensive, because if they do the cost in lives and destruction on the southern side would increase by orders of magnitude. What you do
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Look at Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Saipan, etc. if you want to see the effect "carpet bombing" would have on the Norks' entrenched positions. The U.S. isn't going to carpet bomb anything.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Interesting)
The humanitarian side of it would be difficult regardless of when the war started. China might have to invade from the north and set up refugee camps inside North Korea to prevent millions of refugees from spilling over the border. Now you have to take care to not bomb the Chinese soldiers inside North Korea.
Not too many people outside China seem to get this.
The Chinese would probably be just as glad as not to see Kim and his posse jet off to Tenerife or someplace and leave the place to the South (see DDR, dissolution of). The Chinese would no longer have to be bothered with propping up a régime that has become an embarrassment if not outright liability to them; they wouldn't have to deal with (yes, potentially millions of) North Korean refugees (if anything, they'd probably like to move back about 10 million ethnic Koreans who already live on the Chinese side); and the South would be kept occupied for the next 20 years or so rehabilitating the North, they don't have any islands we think ought to be ours--so sure, let the US continue to be their good friend. Whatever.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
If the US wanted a war with North Korea, the pretext would be far more important than the planning and logistics. North Korea would be able to do terrible damage to South Korea regardless of timing, so it'd look a lot better if the US came charging to the rescue against a North Korea that has gone bat shit insane than if the US was building up an invasion force that would be seen as another act of US aggression and backing Kim Jong-Il into a corner where he might as well strike first with all he's got.
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And if the U.S. did nuke N. Korea, the U.S. would kill most S. Koreans and Japanese and a whole lot of Chinese. It would be a stupid option and no American president or Congress would ever agree to such a thing. And the U.S. Military would strenuously object as well, not to mention most S. Koreans and Japanese and whole lot of Chinese.
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where do you get that silly idea? air bursts don't make fallout, underground penetration bursts don't either.
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You forget thermo-nuclear weapons, they're big, they're nasty and yes indeed air-bursting them doesn't suddenly make the radiation go away. Underground penetration doesn't really help kill the Nork army, and it does still release radiation unless you can drill down a mile and make sure your yields are low. You have some magical notions about nukes.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
You need to look at the cost of not going to war as well.
Would you like to wait, perhaps, until North Korea is testing their Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equivalents?
NK is a bully child in the playground. Fists can be ignored but when he pulls out a knife you have to do something about him...before he pulls out a gun the next time and starts shooting.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
North Korea has been waving their gun around for a long time. Even though you may not care about this from an American perspective, NK has for decades been fully capable of launching devastating attacks on major South Korean population centers (which don't require intercontinental long range missiles). Outside the perspective of "only American lives matter," NK's longer range weapons don't fundamentally change the diplomatic situation: they are still, as they have always been, capable of going out with an unacceptable suicidal bang, simply continuing the same decades-long tense standoff (in order to continue, on their side, receiving aid money/supplies as appeasement). NK's current round of bluster is really nothing new; and, while there is no certainty in dealing with madmen, there is also no positive reason to expect that NK's actual policies (of waving a gun with their finger on the trigger, but stopping short of anything beyond warning shots) have changed.
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Clearly, giving money and supplies to North Korea is simply rewarding bad behavior. Continuing to do so is IMO insane, unless your goal is to encourage the same behavior.
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Well, I'm sure the planning is ready - there have always been plans for NK, and no doubt they get dusted off from time to time (especially at times like these).
Logistics - sure, but the US military is basically ready to go 24x7 more-or-less. Getting all the tanks sealifted (beyond those pre-positioned - which are probably considerable) will take days, but the air war could start with fairly little notice (things like B2s are usually based out of the US anyway - they don't have to go anywhere).
Bigger issues
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The U.S. has nothing much left in Iraq except a few State Dept. employees and contractors for securing them. Do try to keep up.
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And we have already given up in Afghanistan. We're not really at war there either. We don't know what we are doing there, but it's certainly not a war.
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You cannot withdraw immediately because of all the equipment. That's a logistics problem. The other problem is not handing the country to the Taliban. So the U.S. continues to support (yep, the U.S. is still fighting) the Afghanis. If reports are true, some of the provinces are revolting against the Taliban. They aren't expressing any support for the government, they are just pissed at the Taliban for stealing their sons and turning them into human bombs, taking their girls for marriage before they get a ch
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For years and years I drank that same general brand of kool-aid. I'm not doing it any more. Yes, there are logistical and own-forces security problems involved in withdrawal, but no, we're not withdrawing with all deliberate expedition. As for not handing the place over to the Taliban, that's been settled for quite a while now. We don't have the strength and the commitment to dictate who ends up with it. It is certainly going to end up with the Taliban, or with forces very much like the Taliban. Whether tha
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Quote: A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well.
Does any war go well? Some are certainly justified (the ends justify the means, take the US Revolutionary War as an example), but to say that it "went well" isn't appropriate as war is about people killing people (War on Drugs included).
You don't know much about Military do you? (Score:5, Insightful)
Come now, stop and think. What does North Korea have that can not be stopped at will, and don't you realize that those logistics have been worked out pretty consistently? Does North Korea have an Air Force? The answer is "NO", they do not. The few planes they have would be shot down within seconds of taking flight. Nothing they have compares with the US or South Korean planes.
Does North Korea have a Navy? The answer is "NO". They have a few small boats and subs, that like their military planes, would be neutralized within minutes of an engagement.
The few North Korean Soldiers on the border that lived after the first hour of engagement would be just like the Iraqi Army in Gulf 1 and 2. We would have more problems with refugees and surrendering troops than we would the N. Korean Military. ("We" being S. Korea more than the US)
We are not very worried about the few T72 tanks that NK has, so the only thing that may cost a few lives is the initial artillery fire. Air power would eliminate that artillery pretty quickly. Oh, and before you hype the short range rockets remember that those are worse than artillery. They are fire and forget with very poor range, extreme inaccuracy, and often don't even explode on impact.
The biggest rational fears are with the few scud missiles they have, which are inaccurate and slow. We have had Patriot batteries in South Korea from long before we saw them in the Gulf wars. Think about what they have been trying to hype on the News over the last couple days. "N. Korea has moved 1-3 medium range missiles to the east. Really, 1-3 missiles is a concern when they are scud type missiles? That is laughable if you stop and think about it! It would be sad of course if they were to hit someone with one and people died, don't get me wrong. But it is not a big military threat.
I have not quite figured out the game that's being played politically, but the hype of doom and gloom is grossly exaggerated. I have some speculations, but at present they are not very sound. Some considerations are "Why has China not stopped NK from threats?" China has that much power over NK, perhaps they want to be involved? Why has the US propaganda media (Fox/ABC/NBC) been hyping NK as a real military threat like they did the Iraqi Army? We know their capabilities, and have no reason to over play them unless our politicians (or perhaps more appropriately the people pulling their strings) want a war.
And lets not put this into terms like the propaganda machine might. We don't need to invade and capture North Korea to win and neither does South Korea. We take out anything in their military that "may" cause anyone else harm and leave them the fuck alone. Let the great leader sit in the sand box and cry because you took his shovel away for trying to hit other kids with it. If South Korea want's to drive up to the capital and make it official, that's fine but the US does not have too, and should not consider it.
There is no need for a long drawn out Gorilla war, and if we get into one it's our the politicians fault. Our politicians need to be dealt with harshly if that happens.
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Yeah, I don't even know if North Korea has an air force in a practical sense. They cut to stock footage of airborne Mig-21:s (and older planes) in the propaganda film that they released the other week, which I guess suggest that they don't have anything that flies today.
North Korea does however have a tremendous amount of old military equipment including thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. If those are still able to roll and if they were allowed to mobilize and drive up to the DMZ they could cause a lo
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By the way, I'm afraid that China has a lot less influence over the north that one might think.
North Korea is basically the world's largest cult compound. China supplies food and energy, but you have to keep in mind that the folks who depend on those resources to survive are basically expendable for the greater good of the 'cult'. Plus, China doesn't really want to starve North Korea because that would trigger a refugee crisis along their border, which they don't want.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Informative)
A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well.
You make it seem as if this hasn't already happened. We're still in a state of war with them. I'm stationed here on the Korean peninsula and we go through peninsula wide exercises twice a year to simulate a war here. On top of that, we go through tactical training at a unit level even more frequently than that.
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There was a time that would have been a good plan. That time was before the invention of radio. Try that today and every TV channel outside the US, and a few of those in, will be carrying endless footage of the hell-on-earth that results. Starvation, disease, warlords recruiting children as forced soldiers in their fight for control, and the US getting the blame for it all.
Destroying all military infrasturcture would almost work, but you only end up postponing the problem: Eventually they will rebuild, unle
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Interesting)
You're both forgetting about China, who might have a few things to say about a large scale US military operation on their border...
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which is the only reason north korea even exists
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Fuck them. These monkeys need to be taught a lesson, and I'm not talking stupid Iraq/Afghanistan type lessons, more like Desert Storm. Go destroy every piece of infrastructure they have and then let them rot in their own fetid mess. Innocent people will die, but the alternative is for innocent people to die too, so better off on our terms and without the protracted occupation or losses on our side. Control the air and render their offensive capability useless and they cease to be a threat.
And if China were to abide by the terms of its defensive treaty with North Korea, by militarily aiding North Korea, America could use its Death Star to blow-up planet China. What could possibly go wrong?
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The "smart bombs" we would use to destroy their infrastructure cost 10 times that of their targets. There is no winning.
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:4, Insightful)
fair market value of targets completely irrelevant and useless point of view for the purposes of warfare. Risk and benefit analysis of war doesn't include those numbers.
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Well, they don't have oil, but they have probably stored enough diesel for the drive down to the south. North Korea has more than a million troops. Tens of thousands of those are special forces. You do no want those to start moving and gain momentum and gain the initiative.
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hole in your logic, in such regimes those huge forces are purposely very dependent on top command. take out command and control and the whole thing turns into a headless chicken
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Yes, but North Korea reportedly has many, many kilometers of deep underground tunnels and bunkers. The leaders could be hiding anywhere at any given time.
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It's the 48th parallel, and it has actually not been the border for about 60 years now.
Level the country = kill tens of millions for no other reason than they had the misfortune to be born residents of a pustule state.
There... Does your dick-waving make you feel like more of a man now?
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
We probably have a nuclear sub or 2 off the cost. We could empty all tubes on NK and level the country.
Murdering millions of innocent non-combattant peasants, nice. I thought Milosevic was dead. See you at the Hague when you're done, ASSHOLE!
Re:Are You Kidding Me? (Score:5, Insightful)
And if it fails... (Score:2)
And since missile systems are corporate welfare programmes with no actual military purpose, maybe it would be a good idea not to have a test that could go badly and provide the wrong kind of encouragement.
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And since missile systems are corporate welfare programmes with no actual military purpose, maybe it would be a good idea not to have a test that could go badly and provide the wrong kind of encouragement.
Spoken just like someone who's never had a SCUD come sailing over their border to land indiscriminately in the middle of the town where you live and work. But of course your assertion is iron-clad here on Slashdot, because you used the magic root password: "corporate." Yes! If it takes a group of people to form a business to make or do something bigger than running a dog grooming operation out of Mom's basement, it must be Eeeevil. I realize that you make your game playing money by putting flyers for that
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Actually, the missile part of DoD is the cheap part, the real money is in pensions, health care, active duty military, etc.
Strictly Theater (Score:3)
No one seems to have pointed out that North Korea has no national means of detecting the launch of such a missile and it's doubtful that they have a radar that would be able to track the RVs when they hit around Kwajalein. I guess someone hanging around Vandenburg AFB (where we launch the operational readiness test flights; not an operational ICBM field) could phone Kim-jung Un and tell him we launched it but that's about it. Likewise, an ICBM launched from the U.S. at North Korea would follow a great cir
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That pimple on the ass country is actually making us change our military test plans? Puhhhlllease.
No, it the normal thing sane countries do when tensions are high. They want to avoid a miscalculation that results in an outcome that neither side wants. It's part of the rules. For example, Bears regularly conducted surveillance overflights on carrier battle groups. They knew not to open bomb bay doors, and we simply trailed them. Sometimes, a country breaks the rules; such as Libya when several MIGs kept turning towards 2 F-14s every time the Tomcats turned away to indicate they were not intending to enga
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Well, it's not very erudite, but flamebait? A little harsh, mods.
OP was not advocating 'testing' it on a NK target, for example.
(S)he's got a point; why should the USA, (I'm not from there), change its plans?
Pandering to NK has never worked. Ever.
A little quote. Stalin once said of international diplomacy
"Push the tip of the bayonet in. If you hit mush, push the bayonet through to the hilt. If you hit steel, withdraw the bayonet."
Time to show a little steel, methinks. Of course we don't want to provoke
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You have a crazy twitchy person with his finger on the button for a nuclear weapon. They keep talking about striking the US directly, but if they really wanted to do some damage they'd go for Japan or South Korea, both of which can be hit quite easily.
Now it's *possible* that Kim-Jong Un is just pretending to be bonkers. But it's also possible that he actually is bonkers. Do you really want to take that gamble?
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The fact that Barack "Chamberlin" Obama, the appeaser, is ordering this, pretty much guarantees if NK *does* have the stones to lob a nuke at SK/Alaska/Hawaii, that Obama won't retaliate in kind.. I strongly suspect "Lil Kim" and his cronies have the wherewithall to hit SK pretty much anywhere, with whatever nuclear materials they have, and perhaps as far as Alaska/Hawaii... Lil Kim doesn't even have to aim it very well.. Get it close to Anchorage or Honolulu and do an airburst at 50K ft.. Can you say EMP?
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You've got to be trolling. If North Korea nukes anybody they are fucked immediately. In that scenario, it wouldn't matter if Obama was a robot sent from North Korea with the express mission of sabotaging the United States.
Not firing a test missile on a particular day is not even *remotely* appeasement. Chamberlain ceded territory to Hitler.
For that matter, Chamberlain is the one who actually declared war against the Nazis. The US sat it out for years. He takes a lot of flack for somebody who was only a
You're missing out on important facts (Score:2)
This article really says it all ...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/07/snl-kim-jong-un-declares-gay-marriage-legal-in-north-korea_n_3032251.html [huffingtonpost.com]
This is what happens when you send Dennis Rodman over as an ambassador!
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There are only two ways to handle a madman with nukes. Either kill him or try to placate him. Pick one.
Re:Battered Wife Syndrome (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't settle for less than both.
Try to placate him... until you can kill him.
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Too bad you posted anon. That's a plus 5 comeback if ever I saw one.
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Really? Are you kidding? Nobody gives a shit about NK except maybe South Korea and China until Dear Leader starts acting like a madman threatening to blow his neighbors away. We want him dead because it's scary to have a lunatic with nukes. When it was just the US and the good ole USSR staring at each other we pretty much knew that neither side really wanted to pull the trigger, they had too much to lose. Now you've got this syphilitic little shit that may just be crazy enough to pull the trigger and h
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A perfect example. When push came to shove the USSR backed down. They knew where it would go and didn't want to go there. Just like we backed down many times later rather than push things too far. Too much to lose.
Not so - it was a trade-off. Kennedy pulled missiles out of Turkey, USSR pulled out of Cuba. Refer here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_missile_crisis [wikipedia.org]
There was a requirement that the Kennedy deal didn't get told publicly - one reason I didn't know about it 'til I saw it in my daughter's history books. My dad never did, and died thinking Kennedy had stared Krushchev out,,,
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Minuteman III was developed in the 1960's. Sorry about your ignorance.
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Well, you can't just leave a missile in a silo for 5 decades and expect it to still work. Anyway, the mission has changed for ICBMs. There are far fewer, so the individual missiles must be more accurate and more reliable.
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um... the Atlas and the Titan were ICBM launch platforms. NASA discovered a secondary use as Mercury and Gemini launchers.
In fact, the whole entire space program is an incidental to ballistic missile technology developed by Nazi Germany, for weapons of mass destruction, during the Second World War.
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> Why the heck are you still developping new fangled intercontinental missile ?
We have crazy dictators threatening us with a nuclear first strike.
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"If the second Korean War breaks out, Seoul will disappear in thirty minutes by North Korean artillery. And there are ten million people living in Seoul."
This is complete rubbish and the ability to destroy Seoul thing is just complete and utter bluster.
Hitler spent about 3 years trying to destroy London and he had far more devastating munitions available than North Korea does. This is in part because Hitler had an air force capable of dropping large bombs whilst the North Korean air force wouldn't even be a