North Korea Launches Missile From Submarine (cnn.com) 112
schwit1 shares breaking news from CNN: North Korea has fired what is believed to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile off the east coast of the Korean peninsula, the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said Saturday. The missile was fired at 6:30 p.m. local time (5:30 a.m. ET), South Korean officials said, and appears to have flown for about 30 km (about 19 miles) -- well short of the 300 km (roughly 186 miles) that would be considered a successful test... Pyongyang carried out its fourth nuclear test in January. It said it succeeded in miniaturizing nuclear warheads to fit on medium-range ballistic missiles -- which U.S. intelligence analysts say is probably true.
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Nah, send John Kerry to talk at them, they'll never forgive us.
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Nah, send John Kerry to talk at them, they'll never forgive us.
Don't dis John Kerry . . . he has been conspicuously absent from the mud-slinging Presidential shindig . . . which means that he will probably be Hillary's choice for a running mate.
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Not obviously incompetent enough.
Every VP sense Quayle has been there mostly as an assassination deterrent.
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I pity whoever gets smell.
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...he has been conspicuously absent from the mud-slinging Presidential shindig
But unfortunately, it's not because he's being prepped to be launched atop a three-stage ICBM aimed at North Korea. ;)
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No half measures. It's time for the nuclear option. I say we ship Paris Hilton over there.
Stop feeding the troll (Score:1)
NK is the perfect troll. There are days when I think we should just poke them till they level SK. Then just level all of NK. Use that as an example forever to the rest of the world "Don't be a dick".
But most days, I kind of wish we all just ignored them. Just stop feeding their ego and encouraging their tantrums. Their system will collapse pretty quickly. Their own people will fix it to stop the suffering.
OH, any idiot that goes there and gets captured. Tax payers provide one way tickets to anyone who wan
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If by poke you mean "completely ignore", yes, we should. Stop sending them food and force them to attack someone. Then nuke them when they do. Problem solved.
Except China.
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Very quickly indeed...
Re: Stop feeding the troll (Score:2)
It's been 60 years because the rest of the world keeps supporting them. Heck their very existence is based on foreign aid and the US saying "Ok, let's draw a line here."
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Pretty much, China protects them, so make China pay to support them and it wont be long before China ends the problem. Fair and reasonable as China is the only country in the world that can resolve the problem, a trade, a bunch of small island for part of a peninsula.
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China probably regrets stepping into the Korean War.
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The problem is that their game plan is to have 3 key technologies that ensure they can always retaliate if invaded or even nuked completely. Submarines, sub launched missiles, and nuclear weapons on those missiles. With that combination you can always have subs in the deep ocean (on rotation) and waiting to hit the USA in retaliation. Once they have that nobody can touch them without a very large risk of getting at least one nuke onto a major city because they can get very close into the west coast of the USA making it much harder to intercept a warhead before it hits it's target. So if that gang is not shut down soon they never will be,
In that case, the US response will be to kill a bunch of whales and dolphins.
That is, total-coverage with the Navy's low-frequency sonar that bursts the eardrums (or equivalent) of cetaceans within miles, making them unable to navigate, converse, or to find food by echo-location.
Note that the US West Coast is along the seasonal-migration route for numerous species of cetaceans.
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North Korea might have the launched missile of those three pieces. They definitely do not have the submarine piece.
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You've obviously thought this through far more in the last 30 seconds than I have in the decade that I've been trying to get employment in DPRK. In which case you've got a good explanation why DPRK have changed from wanting to reunite the two Koreas to wanting to destroy one, and from wanting to destroy America to wanting to leave it alone.
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Just so you know, it is highly doubtful NK could even level Seoul, let alone all of SK. Yes, they have tons of artillery pointed at Seoul, but gunpowder doesn't last forever, and they don't exactly have tons of money to keep buying the powder (or paying people to man them) needed to keep the artillery running. Most likely, it is a paper tiger, not an actual usable method of attack.
Why aren't we... (Score:1)
... just grasping the nettle and invading North Korea? We seem to be just waiting for them to develop a viable nuclear ICBM. This is insane. Frankly it's worth a few 10,000s of deaths in Seoul. Not to sound too callous but in the long run reuniting Korea under Seoul rule will save WAY more lives and stabilize the region.
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Europe is taking fucktons of refugees. Frankly I think SK and China could definitely handle lots of NK refugees. In the case of SK, they ever speak the same language and most of their history is shared.
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Right - Europe is far LESS able to absorb middle-eastern and african refugees, culturally, than China and SK would be able to absorb NK refugees!
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1) China's isolationism is over. That ship has left dock and there's no turning back.
2) What's worse, SK trying to rebuild NK and accepting refugees, or SK getting nuked by NK?
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They CAN handle them, but they don't WANT them.
SK would definitely suffer for a period after they absorbed them - Not unlike Germany in the 1990s after the wall fell - But there are huge benefits too. NK has huge amounts of natural resources in the ground, possibly including rare-earth minerals. SK's coffers would benefits greatly from access to those resources.
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We praise Nevel Chamberlain who enables horrible things to happen while attacking Churchill who clearly explains what will happen and he turns out to be right.
The historians who specialize in political history have been telling the world this for decades. As usual, they only have part of the picture.
The military historians have a better idea just what Britain's capabilities would have been.
Hint: they would have been fighting the Luftwaffe over England with biplanes.
Fighting with biplanes actually happened in Greece and Africa during the early stages of the war, because those theaters were lower priority than Britain and didn't have the new monoplanes in signific
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MacArthur was a pompous fool riding the glory he got from WW1 and there are many situations in WW2 and Korea that showed that. There were UN leaders that wanted to stop UN forces at the neck of Korea where it was about 100 miles wide, which would have left 90% of the North Korean population in SK's hands. Instead he decide to go ahead and charge northward running towards the Yalu river and China using US troops instead of the Korea only forces that the Pentagon had said he should. Those double fuck-ups prov
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Frankly it's worth a few 10,000s of deaths in Seoul.
That is a vast under-estimate of the casualties. In America, we have suburbs, in Korea this is what a suburb looks like [asianarchitecture.info]. That's not a bad thing necessarily, and I think we need more like that in San Francisco, but with that kind of density, it's easy to see how 10,000 people could die in just a few shots.
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The US isn't daily threatening to turn other countries into radioactive ash.
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NK doesn't threaten to attack the US, it says that any attack BY the US will be met will a strong defence.
Anyway, this is a great step forward for peace, surely. Mutually Assured Destruction is a key to stopping devastating conventional wars, so any state that is threatened by the US should seek long range nuclear weapons. You can't argue that only the good guys get nukes, that's not how MAD works.
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NK doesn't threaten to attack the US, it says that any attack BY the US will be met will a strong defence.
Anyway, this is a great step forward for peace, surely. Mutually Assured Destruction is a key to stopping devastating conventional wars, so any state that is threatened by the US should seek long range nuclear weapons. You can't argue that only the good guys get nukes, that's not how MAD works.
Oh yes they have. [newsmax.com] I'm pretty sure I recall San Francisco being mentioned as well. Your theory also fails to take into account they're ruled by a megalomaniac dictator who's not exactly in the most stable state of mind. While I have doubts they'd actually be fired, it only takes one nationalistic soldier to press the button and BOOM! Both Koreas and a chunk of China forever destroyed.
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Reading comprehension failure. They don't say they want to do it, they are just warning the US that they have the capability. In other words, ensuring that the US knows MAD exists.
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MAD does not work so well in a multi-lateral environment.
We cannot "nuke the tar" out of NK as "blithely" as we could Russia or China.
The area is too small. Retaliation against NK ( as carried out by most options we have ) would also threaten at least China, and possibly Russia.
This limits our retaliatory options severely. Most nuclear options are off the table.
Conventional methods are much more difficult.
China has shown repeatedly that they OK with a modest, plausibly deniable, actions by NK that the US
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Nuclear war risk (Score:2)
I think the North Koreans are going to push the envelope until there is an actual military conflict (whether by intention or by accident due to miscalculation). Either way, the risk of the Korean peninsula winding up as a nuclear battleground strikes me as being rather high. I don't see negotiation as being a successful strategy with them as all previous agreements have been treated more as "temporary guidelines" by the regime. Hopefully, a way is found to bounce the crazies before the folks who are alre
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nuclear battleground? If they dared to launch anything against the US, the whole of Nork would simply get reduced to a giant glowing crater within seconds, and Kim Jong is not yet delusional enough to not know this too.
The show he's putting on is all to do with exerting control over his own people with fear of their own military. It has really nothing to do with the outside world.
Re:Nuclear war risk (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to think that there was a near 100% certainty that a nuclear attack on the United States would result in a near immediate overwhelming nuclear response, the oft-described "glassing over" of any country that attempted a nuclear attack on the United States.
Lately, though, I'm more worried that our leadership is inclined to look at a small-scale attack on a US city as an acceptable strategic loss in a larger chess match of diplomacy and posturing, with endless strategizing, with the relentless presence of lawyers generating briefs to justify any kind of US response in a sea of legalism. We seem incapable of prosecuting military campaigns under the rubric of warfare, only in carefully measured and fully structured
I think the DPRK really would rather not get into a nuclear conflict with the US, but I do think that trying to get the US mired in a conventional conflict would be considered a positive strategic outcome.
DPRK is like a giant warehouse of every Soviet/Chinese conventional weapon system made since the 1950s and they've had 50-odd years to dig in everywhere. It's not that the US couldn't defeat the North Koreans, but doing so in any conventional way would require a massive, grinding and costly application of conventional military forces.
DPRK would probably do a lot of damage with artillery to Seoul, take some initial heavy losses and then with Chinese involvement engage in long rounds of truces and negotiations designed to stymie a military response that would do any serious damage and make the US and RoK appear as aggressors.
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I would guess that the South Korean government would gladly trade a few hundred artillery shells hitting Seoul for the whole of North Korea getting nuked by the US.
Of course they'd never admit that publicly because they have to be seen to believe that every South Korean life is sacred.
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Public opinion was a major driving force in my long-term belief that an attack by DPRK would result in a disproportionate response by the United States.
That being said, the long term trends in military responses and the increasing amount of political involvement in military decisionmaking since Vietnam have led me to question this. The political establishment is high sensitive to personnel losses, humanitarian risks and extra-military diplomatic and economic impacts. How invested is the US business world
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I think the chance of the US attacking NK is much larger that the other way around. With ICBM's, NK might have reduced that chance significantly.
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and how long will there troops last? Be for they give up just to get some food?
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and how long will there troops last? Be for they give up just to get some food?
"An army marches on its stomach" — N. Bonaparte
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If such an attack was made against the USA, it would have to be where the head of the military are based. No leaders around would mean, victory is eminent. Cutting off the head leaves the body alive long enough to be taken and destroyed.
Make sure you don't choose to domicile close to any Military headquarters (White House, for example).
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Kim Jong is not yet delusional enough to not know this too.
yet
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That was exactly my point. I'm glad you picked up on it.
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But at least he tries to reduce the risk of a conventional war started by the US on some trumped-up charge for the sake of regime change. If the charge of, say, weapons of mass destruction, is real, I'm sure the US does not want to risk it. Sure, they would probably win the military conflict, but some of their own major cities might be levelled too. And after years of guirilla war the US invaders would be kicked out anyway. See Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq for previous examples.
Of course, this all assumes
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>> If the charge of, say, weapons of mass destruction, is real, I'm sure the US does not want to risk it.
It seems to me that if he proves he really does have significant nuclear capability and also keeps looking more and more like a psychopath by doing increasingly crazy/threatening shit, he's actually making it MORE likely to get a visit from the US military, not less likely.
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And while we are launching these missiles, heading toward China, what do you think the Chinese will be doing?
Sitting back, saying "oh, those goofy north Koreans.... Do you think it will be an early nuclear winter"?
Or, saying "we have missiles heading toward us, we better get ours flying".
Maybe letting a few fly toward their other adversary, Russia....
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Chances are they would be sub-launched from the sea of Japan. THey wouldn't go anywhere near China.
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I invite you to look at a map of North Korea, SK and China.
While there are a few routes that arent super "toward" China, and the flight times would be short, I cant imagine Chinese leadership agreeing with your assessment.
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Yawn (Score:1)
I'd be more impressed if they launch a submarine from a missile.
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The destruction of the SK industry would not be entirely unwelcome by the EU industry, they are huge competitors.
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Remind me (Score:3)
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WHY do we keep sending "humanitarian" aid to a country devoting a huge portion of its GDP to building offensive weapons instead of food for its own people?
The US did this during the height of the Cold War, when Lysenko's advice to Stalin on crop-yield-optimization utterly failed in the worst way possible. Stalin's successors also reigned during famine-inducing periods. Famine was soon to ensue...
So the US, fearing a "cold and hungry Russia", sent shipload after shipload of grain to its proclaimed arch-enemy, the USSR.
It kind of makes sense. Governments of nations lose power in a matter of a week or two if everyone is starving. Then a demagogue, usually wo
Only took 70 years (Score:3)
It has been 70 years already since the first nuclear bombs were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is only to be expected that scientific and technological progress democratizes these things. My phone has more computing power than every single 1945 computer in the world put together.
Millions of people know fairly advanced physics and electronics.
Lost Submarine (Score:4, Interesting)
Perfect cover (Score:2)
Sounds like a perfect cover, all missiles never work, everything fails. They will never be a threat. Thats a pretty good track record, 0 success, everything blows up after a perfect launch. Build up a working arsenal, while everyone thinks nothing works. Nobody expects the fool.
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Sounds like a perfect cover, all missiles never work, everything fails. They will never be a threat. Thats a pretty good track record, 0 success, everything blows up after a perfect launch. Build up a working arsenal, while everyone thinks nothing works. Nobody expects the fool.
MOD UP!
I already commented in this thread, so can't mod.
You, Grasshopper, are clearly a student of Sun Tzu. And a good one at that.
Under Siege (Score:2)
Didn't the CIA send Tommy Lee Jones to take out the sub that NK was converting to fire missiles?
Pretty soon... (Score:3)
Miniaturized Warhead (Score:1)
What exactly is the big concern? (Score:1)
In the US we do at least that many per month and not a damn person bats an eye. I know, I've taken part in such tests.
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