Are Some of North Korea's Long-Range Missiles Fakes? 322
gbrumfiel writes "North Korea has not been shy in announcing plans to destroy the United States, but questions remain over whether it has the nukes or the missiles to do so. Now NPR reports on open-source intelligence showing that one of the North's most 'advanced' weapons might actually be a decoy. Six KN-08 missiles were paraded last year, but each showed differences in the way they were assembled. Is it all a bluff? Or are the missiles part of a real program?"
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously the ones they parade are just shells. Do you think the US/USSR paraded armed nuclear missiles down the streets back in the day?
Some analysts say... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just read those two lines under that nice picture.
Some analysts say the half-dozen missiles showcased at the military parade were fakes.
So the ones they showed in a parade are fakes. Now how smart do you have to be to decide to use fakes in a parade? I mean, you have maybe only two of them working, maybe only one, or maybe even six in good condition. Why take the risk that something happens while showing them off? Showing them in a parade means they are not ready to use if the US or the South attacks. (How unlikely this might be to us, they have a different perspective.) The decoys might be empty ones that will be used later. That each of them has differences only shows that they are working on them.
Does it matter if SOME are? (Score:4, Insightful)
It only takes ONE to start a major war.
Re:Some analysts say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Much the same reason Iran has released videos of its super mega awesome tech (which turned out to be toys and stock movie footage)... propaganda and posturing.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
They could be iterative design mockups for producing the real thing, or it could be a massive display of horseshit for propaganda.
Or... what's more likely... both.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Some analysts say... (Score:5, Insightful)
You ignore the target of the message. They were not trying to show the US that they had missiles, they were trying to show their own population that they had missiles.
Re:Does it matter if SOME are? (Score:3, Insightful)
The world would have done more than "bat an eye". The world was up in arms over your idiotic and nonsensical invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan (neither of which had anything much to do with 11/9) and you can bet your donkey there would have been international uproar if the US had gone nuclear.
By the way, massacring thousands or millions of innocent, defenceless people (whether by nuclear or conventional weapons) is not "acting like a lion". It's "lashing out like a frightened, hysterical pussy". But then that's Americans for you: Afraid of everything. Afraid of terrorists, even though you're more likely to die accidentally in your bathtub than by terrorist action. Afraid of communists and socialists and paying taxes. Afraid of guns. Afraid of not having guns. Afraid or immigrants. Afraid of ethnic minorities and of ethnic majorities. Afraid of imaginary "death panels", afraid of sonic booms, afraid of killer bees, afraid of flouride in your drinking water, afraid of anything and everything your media and your political system can spin into fear. The reason for this is that sellers and politicians know that Americans have three comforts: Buying, eating and shooting. When Americans are afraid, they start buying, and they will buy anything or vote for anyone that promises them some comfort. But then they start shooting, and they will shoot anyone and anything if it will temporarily assuage their fear.
When Britain faced terrorism in the 1980s, with crazy people blowing up city centres on a regular basis, did we flip the fuck out and start murdering random people by the thousand on the other side of the world? Did we flush our civil rights down the toilet, set up a bunch of overfunded, unaccountable security theatre agencies and usher in a police state in the name of "security"? Did we give a small group of deluded murderers the credibility and reputation a massive, international James-Bond-Villain-conspiracy? No. We set the police onto the bastards and got on with our lives. THAT is "acting like a lion". At the very least, it's "acting like a grown up."
Anyone who is now depressed, here's an on-topic link to cheer you up: watch Dr House sum up the last few decades of American Foreign Policy through the medium of song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqCha93nBTU
Re:Does it matter if SOME are? (Score:4, Insightful)
WE called it war, but blah blah blah bunch of 101st Fighting Keyboarder macho chest-thumping
Why don't you go up to some of my friends who came back from Iraq or Afghanistan missing pieces of themselves and tell them they weren't in a war. I dare you.
Re:Solution: decapitation (Score:4, Insightful)
Be carefuly with that analogy. There's no question that Hussein actually had chemical weapons until the '90s. We sold him the fucking things, and the capability to make more, before the Gulf War, and the UN implemented a disarmament treaty in the aftermath. Whether he was following that threaty - and what risk any remaining weapons might present - was central to the Iraq war. It's not like, apropos of nothing, Western powers decided he must have weapons of mass destruction.
Of course there's a preponderance of evidence that whatever his ambitions, he simply did not have the weapons or the capability to make them. That is, there was evidence of absence, not absence of evidence.
Re:Let's nuke them to be sure (Score:2, Insightful)
You argument would speak against any punishment, with the death penalty just being the most final case. After all, if I'm innocent, I'm not exactly going to be happy to have been imprisoned for 20 years.
And by your logic on an execution being as bad as e.g. murder, do you think that people who illegally imprison others shouldn't be subjected to jail terms, or fraudsters should never be fined?
Re:Let's nuke them to be sure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let's nuke them to be sure (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other side, you have some 600,000 shitty South Korean soldiers who would probably drop their guns and run
The South Korean soldiers I've known would absolutely not do this. They are tough. They would not win against the North alone, but they absolutely would sacrifice themselves to hold off until the US arrives from the south (where the US military bases are).
Also, your idea of military strategy is wrong. 1.1million infantry cannot do anything without support, they will be mowed down like grass. Look at the battle of Somme for an example of what happens when you try to cross a No-Man's-Land with overwhelming numbers of infantry.
North Korea has the capability to inflict millions of civilian casualties on South Korea, on the first day of battle due to the poor strategic location of Seoul, but they won't win a conventional war.
Re:Let's nuke them to be sure (Score:5, Insightful)
You're thinking in the context of mass attacks. That isn't going to happen.
The NK DMZ is 2.5 miles wide. It has no easy passage for vehicles and directly passing through the forest would be all but impossible. Reaching the other side, on foot - if you avoid being eaten or otherwise killed by wildlife or AP mines - would instantly result in being turned into hamburger and/or fine mist by a mix of automated turrets, mortars, etc. Any massing of troops in the forest, as detected by airborne infrared sensors, would immediately result in shelling of the area.
So really, a land passage isn't exactly tenable. There are small passages through these jungles and those are likewise guarded. They'd get shelled out within seconds of any indication of a convoy rolling down the road. (I don't care if they are well trained soldiers, they've got to either walk or ride vehicles, and it takes a long time to move even a fraction of a million people, well trained or not.)
So really, the only tenable way for NK to get actual troops and their associated Chinese vehicles to SK is by sea or air. How well do you think that will work?
Here's a hint: NK uses 1950s-1970s Soviet technology for pretty much everything they do that's "advanced". That means most of what they do is one-off and poorly assembled; they are easily 70 years behind the West at this point in basic industrialization, and they're even further behind if you consider what they are able to produce domestically. NK would almost instantly fall apart internally if they expended the time, energy, and resources to engage in a war - in the matter of days, people would be dying of starvation in high numbers. Posturing alone is likely too much for them to sustain for long.
Re:Let's nuke them to be sure (Score:4, Insightful)
All the history books / classes trumpet the whole "US Defender of Freedom" thing regarding WW2, because we helped stop the holocaust. Yet we have the same sorts of concentration camps / ghettos as in WW2, in North Korea right now. You dont think thats something worth considering war for?
Stopping the Holocaust was not really the reason the US entered the war. The public reason was that we were attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. The real reasons are up for debate. But this is a good object lesson in the use of history classes to reinforce the idea that America = Awesome. Unfortunately history is as often about making one's country look good as relating what really happened way back when.