The US Is Testing a Microwave Weapon To Stop North Korea's Missiles (vox.com) 217
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: According to an NBC News report, the weapon -- which is still under development -- could be put on a cruise missile and shot at an enemy country from a B-52 bomber. It's designed to use microwaves to target enemy military facilities and destroy electronic systems, like computers, that control their missiles. The weapon itself wouldn't damage the buildings or cause casualties. Air Force developers have been working with Boeing on the system since 2009. They're hoping to receive up to $200 million for more prototyping and testing in the latest defense bill. There's just one problem. It's not clear that the weapon is entirely ready for use -- and it's not clear that it would be any more effective than the powerful weapons the U.S. already possesses. The weapon, which has the gloriously military-style name of Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project, or CHAMP, isn't quite ready for action, but it could be soon. Two unnamed Air Force officials told NBC that the weapon could be ready for use in just a few days.
Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:4, Funny)
Because that's how you get popcorn.
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Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Designing the system to cook people would be more effective, as the weapons would be shielded.
This system would require a lot of lead time to load the B-52, takeoff, fly to NK airspace, launch the cruise missile, and wait for its subsonic engines to propel it to the target.
The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
This microwave system would be worthless at countering a NK missile launch. It would only be useful as a first strike weapon. Fear of an American preemptive strike is exactly what motivated NK to develop their nukes in the first place.
Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
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Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
We already know. We are not the orange buffoon who doesn't know.
Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, just to play devil's advocate, what has worked?
Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Diplomacy, open trade, and international organizations. It's not as sexy as nukes and special forces, but the current stability of the world (and it is in an unprecedented state of stability) is almost certainly due to those things.
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Yeah sure. Please point to any time since the Korean war where that's worked with North Korea. Oops, you can't.
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Yeah sure. Please point to any time since the Korean war where that's worked with North Korea. Oops, you can't.
How about the whole time? The armistice agreement has held, and no one has attacked anyone. What's your definition of "worked"?
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How about the whole time? The armistice agreement has held, and no one has attacked anyone. What's your definition of "worked"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_border_incidents_involving_North_and_South_Korea [wikipedia.org]
I don't think we have the same definition of 'no attacks.
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Re:You could just as easily credit nukes (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't believe what the media tells you. The actual numbers say the world has less violence and is more stable today than it ever has been. It's been getting more so for a thousand years, even if you include the 20th century wars.
When you go country-by-country, the factors that emerge as contributing to stability, peace and prosperity are engagement with the international community and international trade ties. The trends were present well before nukes were invented. Nukes may explain why we haven't had any of the largest kinds of wars recently, but they really don't work as a good explanation on any other level, even limited to post 1945: all the nuclear powers have been involved in wars, and several of them aren't or weren't exactly what you'd call stable or peaceful.
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Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:4, Insightful)
Diplomacy, open trade, and international organizations. It's not as sexy as nukes and special forces, but the current stability of the world (and it is in an unprecedented state of stability) is almost certainly due to those things.
What do diplomacy, open trade, and international organizations have to do with North Korea?
Only everything. There are no good military solutions to the conflict with North Korea. They all involve hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. If you think that's acceptable, we should probably reconsider who the murderous psychopath is in this situation.
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hey all involve hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. If you think that's acceptable, we should probably reconsider who the murderous psychopath is in this situation.
If a brief war, killing a 100,000 civilians saves LA or SF or Seattle from becoming Chernobyl you'd call me a psychopath? Really
That is one of the potential options being bandied about. And it isn't like we want to kill 100,000 people in NK, it is that we'd rather not have a city that used to have millions as a pile of nuclear rubble. The difference totalitarian dictators and free people is that brutal dictators don't care about anyone but themselves. And both you and I care about more than ourselves (even
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Why not an offer along the lines of "lose the guns at your southern border and we'll lift some sanctions; drop your nuke program and we'll lift the rest; let us build military installations within your borders and we'll protect you with our nukes" instead? You know, turn our nukes into a positive for them, rather than a negative, and en
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"The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. "
Incorrect. I read in one of the Korean news sites about it a day or two before the launch. The stuff that leaks out of the military probably has a day or two delay. I would expect the mil to have at least a 2 day warning on something like this. (I looked up the Korean site because I saw an article in one of the US mainstream sites.)
Remember, intelligence such as "order Lobster and lot's of munchies for launch site 11" would be correlated at the NSA
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This system would require a lot of lead time to load the B-52, takeoff, fly to NK airspace, launch the cruise missile, and wait for its subsonic engines to propel it to the target.
The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
This is why the US needs Prompt Global Strike
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Not just first strike. It would prevent any further command center functions before carpet bombing them back to the stone age. Though, I don't really think it should spare personnel or buildings in that case. Maybe that is only there to appease the pacifists.
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This microwave system would be worthless at countering a NK missile launch. It would only be useful as a first strike weapon. Fear of an American preemptive strike is exactly what motivated NK to develop their nukes in the first place.
All this is assuming the news report itself is not complete boloney that is simply designed to cause a reaction so the recon analysts can see which ones of the 258 suspected high tech and nuclear weapons sites in N-Korea show a sudden flurry of activity erecting screen defences against a first strike with a microwave weapon.
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Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:5, Informative)
This system would require a lot of lead time to load the B-52, takeoff, fly to NK airspace, launch the cruise missile, and wait for its subsonic engines to propel it to the target.
The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
The US could keep a flight/flights of CHAMP-equipped-cruise missile-carrying B52s on station 24/7/365 as the old Soviet Union and NATO used to so during the Cold War.
Really though, as someone with extensive high-powered RF engineering experience including radar and microwave, I have serious doubts about how effective such a weapon could be IRL. The inverse-square law of transmitted power, distance to receiver/tarfet, and signal strength/current/voltage/thermal heating induced means it would also require enormous amounts of power, especially with a size-limited transmission antenna array due to it all being crammed into a cruise missile.
It's extremely inefficient energy-transfer wise. Only a tiny fraction of the power transmitted actually reaches the intended target (or receiver in the case of radio). Unless they can pack 1.21 gigawatts (or some similar ridiculously-huge number) into a cruise missile, I can't see how this could possibly be effective and practical as a weapon.
Sounds more like propaganda for both domestic (look! we're doing...something!) and NK consumption (we'll blind you with Science! [insert cheesy Thomas Doolby '80s pop tune]) while doubling as a handy excuse to hand out US defense money for the usual reasons.
Strat
Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:5, Interesting)
You grossly misunderstand North Korea. The U.S. has had the capability to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea unchallenged for over 65 years and hasn't done so. There isn't much else it can/could have done to assuage North Korea's fears and convince it that it wasn't going to attack (at least not without opening up South Korea to another North Korean attack - North Korea's two top goals are to drive the U.S. out of the peninsula, and to reunify it, by violent means if necessary).
Even the U.S. troops stationed in South Korea (about 37,000) aren't sufficient in number to represent any meaningful offensive fighting force if the U.S. did decide to launch a preemptive strike(North Korea has just shy of 1 million active military personnel). The U.S. troops there know it too. They call themselves "speed bumps." Their sole purpose is, in the event of a North Korean invasion, to be overrun and killed, so that the U.S. has an excuse to immediately get involved in a second Korean War without having to go through the UN like the first time (which only succeeded because the USSR was boycotting the UN that week)..
North Korea's ire against the U.S. isn't based on paranoia. It's based on propaganda. Any repressive system generates extreme discontent within its population, which eventually leads to uprising and revolution. Unless you can present the people with an external bogeyman that they can fear and hate instead of their oppressive overload. North Korea has chosen the U.S. to be that bogeyman. They teach [dailynk.com] their grade schoolers [sapardanis.org] to want to attack Americans [all-that-i...esting.com] for crying out loud. Please, educate yourself on what actually goes on in North Korea before you believe their claims of victimhood.
In a way, North Korea is a test for what the world's future will be like. You attribute the lack of a violent confrontation with North Korea for 65 years to the effectiveness of a pacifist approach to them. My hunch is that it's more because North Korea simply didn't have the capability to strike outside of its borders effectively. The nukes aren't going to end with North Korea. On the contrary, this is just the beginning. First it'll be rogue nation-states getting nukes. Then rogue organizations. Then rogue individuals. You're not going to be able to appease them all by being pacifist. At some point, one of them is going to be sufficiently offended or self-deluded to actually use those nukes.
The world needs to come up with some effective strategy for dealing with the proliferation of nukes. I honestly don't know what the best approach is (if it were simple, we would've already done it). I'm extremely troubled by Trump's aggressive attitude towards North Korea, but I can kinda see his point. We've known for decades that North Korea was a cancer in the socio-political fabric of the world. If it had been excised early on, we wouldn't be having this problem today. But instead we did nothing, taking the pacifist approach and hoping the problem would go away by itself. Well, it hasn't, and now it has nukes. And like I said, this isn't just about North Korea. This is just the beginning. Next it'll be rogue organizations with nukes, then rogue individuals with nukes. I really hope we can establish some effective way to deal with them, or we're doomed. We're going to look back at the time when terrorists brought down airliners with a bomb as the good old days.
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North Korea's ire against the U.S. isn't based on paranoia. It's based on propaganda. Any repressive system generates extreme discontent within its population, which eventually leads to uprising and revolution. Unless you can present the people with an external bogeyman that they can fear and hate instead of their oppressive overload. North Korea has chosen the U.S. to be that bogeyman. They teach [dailynk.com] their grade schoolers [sapardanis.org] to want to attack Americans [all-that-i...esting.com] for crying out loud. Please, educate yourself on what actually goes on in North Korea before you believe their claims of victimhood.
The ironic thing to me is that this describes the United States as well. Just reverse the names, and the paragraph still works. We don't demonize North Korea in our text books, but the rest is pretty accurate.
We've known for decades that North Korea was a cancer in the socio-political fabric of the world. If it had been excised early on, we wouldn't be having this problem today. But instead we did nothing, taking the pacifist approach and hoping the problem would go away by itself. Well, it hasn't, and now it has nukes.
You think McArthur should have been allowed to go all the way to the Chinese border? You think the US would have prevailed in a war with China? I think you need to read up on the history if you think the US has taken a pacifist approach to North Korea. We killed 600,000 civilians there. "Hoping t
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I wish I had mod points for you. As someone who spent six years working over there, I'm in full agreement with what you've stated here. I will add that I feel for the people of NK because they quite simply don't know anything about the outside world unless they're part of the ruling class.
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Agree. A country's military potential is not measured by headcount.
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Yeah, comparing training, equipment, the benefits of holding a defensive position, the logistics involved in materially outnumbering the US at any given location and the speed with which reinforcements will arrive I was sat here thinking, "That's almost a fair fight."
Re:Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:4)
There is no convincing the Norks the U.S. doesn't desire to own a poor country with nothing going for it. The intellectual giants running N. Korea only keep the threat of U.S. intervention alive so they can give the public a reason why they should stay in power and shouldn't be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
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Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
Well, every attempt to negotiate or appease North Korea has also lead to paranoia and weapons development.
Maybe someday we'll all learn that not every situation is like a school exam [youtu.be] or a video game where there is a right answer that resolves things cleanly.
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Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
Well, every attempt to negotiate or appease North Korea has also lead to paranoia and weapons development.
You sure about that? http://www.independent.co.uk/v... [independent.co.uk]
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Clinton got played (and I say this as someone that's voted 'Clinton' 5 times already), and so did South Korea. North Korea never dismantled their nuclear program, as was obvious from being ready for tests. They never stopped counterfeiting US dollars or using their 'credentialed' diplomats to run drugs and ivory [wikipedia.org].
Their MO is pretty clear: do bad things, expect to be rewarded for stopping them, then do them again in order to extract more concessions. Most of the world is wise to this game after this many iter
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The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. They were able to fuel and prepare the missile for launch without detection.
That is incorrect. I read a news report out of Tokyo that NK appeared to be preparing for a ballistic missile test about 6 hours before the launch occurred. (Quick Googling find one such source [dailycaller.com] here)
That's not to say that a surprise launch cannot occur, just that we have so far managed to detect them in advance.
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Maybe someday America will learn that you don't convince your adversary to stop being paranoid by threatening to attack them.
You are aware we have tried to negotiate with them, right? We gave them aid, asking them to stop developing nukes. They agreed, then immediately went about developing nukes in secret until inspectors were told to take a hike. More than once we've gone down the 'let's play nice' game only to have the North Koreans breaking the agreements.
Negotiation kinda requires that both sides be faithful to the agreements. North Korea has repeatedly shown it will not adhere to any agreements and will break them whene
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"The NK missile launch last week occurred with NO warning. "
No public warning. There's zero chance that we didn't know about the planned launch.
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Here's hoping the weapon isn't another Bradly that only works on paper.
As the saying goes... (Score:2)
You're just being paranoid...
Yeah, that's only because everyone is out to kill me.
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I think the idea would be to have them on a ship, that is sitting next to NK.
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Don't mistake no public warning with no warning. You are acting like there isn't a new mover of spy satellites watching North Korea at any given moment.
The spy satellites that have the resolution to see the launch preparations are in LEO, and have a viewing window of less than a minute during each orbit.
The spy satellites that can dwell and "zoom-in" are only in the movies.
Also, the missile was prepped and launched in the middle of the night, and this time of year Korea has plenty of clouds.
Re: Are North Korea using corn-based missiles? (Score:5, Interesting)
If only we had stealth drones equipped with synthetic aperture radar that can generate FLIR-quality images through cloud cover. Like the RQ-170 and its successor, the RQ-180...
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Clouds can be seen through with a variety of satellite sensors
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Designing the system to cook people would be more effective ...
Or almost cook. It worked for the Cubans. At least that's what I'm guessing they used.
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popcorn
I believe that was the laser based weapon.
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No, that is just the NK early warning system.
Sir, apparently they had advance warning our missiles were inbound.
How is this possible?
They have corn.
Dear God!
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Re:AJIT PAI == SHITTY SMELLY INDO-CHIMP (Score:4, Informative)
No he isn't. He's US-born, raised and educated, graduating from one of your prestigious law schools and working as a lawyer for a glorious US telecommunications megacorporation. He's American through-and-through.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank God for North Korea (Score:5, Insightful)
Finally, a reason to spend billions more on missile defense. The arms industry will be very happy indeed.
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Re:Thank God for North Korea (Score:4, Informative)
High energy ground based lasers, using adaptive optics to reduce atmospheric distortion, could reliably block North Korean missiles from hitting America. All the technology exists for this.
We already have laser planes which can shoot down a missile under ideal conditions. I'd be surprised if those haven't been improved since they were invented, to the point that they might even shoot down a sufficiently primitive missile in the real world.
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Since we're not in such a situation... (Hint: The person making threats and increasing the chance of war lives in Mar-a-Lago, not Pyongyang. If he'd shut the fuck up and stop acting like a schoolyard bully, we wouldn't be in this situation.)
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The DPRK has been declaring war, or claiming war has been declared against it 200 times since 1997. It's basically the default thing for the DPRK to do.
https://www.nknews.org/2017/09... [nknews.org]
Despite the very public statement, Ri's comments are far from the first time the DPRK has claimed that declarations of war have been made against it.
The phrase "declaration of war" appears in Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) English language articles over 200 times since 1997 - a search of NK Pro's KCNA Watch database shows - and many of those entries echo Ri's press conference.
In fact, Ri's comments aren't even the first time that North Korea has claimed Trump himself has declared war on the country.
On September 22 and 23, six articles were published by the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in response to Trump's UN General Assembly (UNGA) speech on September 19, during which he threatened to "totally destroy" North Korea
"The United States has great strength and patience but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," Trump said during his UNGA address.
The six KCNA articles carried statements from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country of the DPRK (CPRC), the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea (CC, WPK), various military officials and citizens, all of whom claimed the speech represented a declaration of war.
"Trump's rubbish is the open declaration of war against our supreme dignity, state, social system and people, and an unpardonable extra-large provocation," the CPRC statement said, according to KCNA.
So aside from Trump's recent comments, what constitutes a declaration of war in the eyes of the North Korean state?
THE COUNTRY THAT CRIED WAR
In April, KCNA published a memorandum by the DPRK Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) that provided a recap of what, it claimed, were declarations of war against North Korea.
A review of the memorandum reveals a broad set of criteria. For one, policies from North Korea's opponents have been cited as a declaration of war.
In 2003, for instance, the MFA considered President George Bush to have openly declared "nuclear war" against North Korea "by putting it as a target of preemptive nuclear strike," according to the memorandum.
Accusations against the DPRK also qualified. Again in 2003, KCNA said that U.S. claims that North Korea was engaged in "drug smuggling, counterfeiting of money, suppression of religion, human traffic (sic) and training of computer hackers" as well increased pressure on aviation and merchant vessel activity, qualified as a declaration of war "no matter how hard they may try to cover up them."
The adoption of sanctions against the country have also inspired this response from North Korean state media and in 2006, the year of North Korea's first nuclear test, it claimed that the adoption of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions against the country was a "de facto 'declaration of war'."
"The UNSC 'resolution,' needless to say, cannot be construed otherwise than a declaration of a war against the DPRK," the MFA said, following the adoption of Resolution 1718.
The same claim has been made repeatedly following the adoption of subsequent UNSC resolutions as well as after the U.S.'s imposition of unilateral sanctions. Further UN action against North Korea has also inspired similar responses.
In November 2014, a UNGA committee voted overwhelmingly in favor of a draft resolution recommending that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court.
North Korea's National Defence Commission (NDC) responded with the following statement: "The brigandish 'resolution' against the DPRK's genuine human rights means the most undisguised war declaration to infringe upon its sovereignty," the November 23 NDC statement read.
The joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea, which are consistently condemned by North Korea, also fit the bill for such claims as can be seen in a KCNA article in March.
"Key Resolve and Foal Eagle joint military maneuvers of the U.S. and south Korean puppet warmongers are an open declaration of war against the DPRK as they reveal their sinister scenario to launch a nuclear war against it," the March 15 article read.
South Korea has also been singled out for its closing of the formerly joint-run Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) last year.
"The recent provocative measure is a declaration of an end to the last lifeline of the north-south relations, total denial of the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration and a dangerous declaration of a war," a KCNA article from February 2016 said of the decision.
It is not exclusively the actions of nation states that inspire such claims.
In an effort to spread information within North Korea and inspire dissent within the country, activists in South Korea - many of whom are defectors - launch balloons that carry leaflets across the border and into the DPRK.
North Korea has reacted angrily to such launches and communicated via state media that it considers the practice yet another declaration of war.
In 2015, North Korea's military "described the massive spread of the leaflets and electronic media across the whole military demarcation line as a blatant provocative act of declaring war," a Pyongyang Times article read.
While the launches were conducted by non-governmental groups, North Korea decided that they were "aided and abetted by the south Korean authorities."
Now I was no fan of Obama's but there's no way I'd take the DPRK's side against him.
Actually they had a similar dispute against Obama when Kerry - who I also dislike - imposed sanctions
https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]
And Clinton said if North Korea used nuclear weapons it would be 'the end of their country as they know it'.
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Bullshit. The Norks have a vested interest in pumping up the anxiety level, it allows them to claim their leaders shouldn't be taken out and shot due to incompetence. The fact that the Orange Bobblehead falls into hyperventilation is also beside the point, he hyperventilates about anything. And when something doesn't present itself as something he can fulminate against, he'll create faux "issues". The thing about el Presidente Tweetie is that his brain cells aren't really connected. They require a constant
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I'm very concerned that if we weaponize space and there IS a war the trash we would end up with circling the Earth would trap us here until we achieved our well-deserved extinction. Maybe we should try diplomacy instead.
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Saddam agreed to complete disarmament and full inspections prior to the invasion, but not until the US and UK were on his doorstep. He even offered exile for himself. However the "coalition of the willing" ignored him and invaded anyway.
He didn't leave Kuwait before the Gulf War. And he didn't disarm verifiably before the invasion - he maintained a policy of strategic ambiguity for fear of Iran, according to George Piro who interrogated him for the FBI
https://archives.fbi.gov/archi... [fbi.gov]
"Saddam misled the world into believing that he had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war because he feared another invasion by Iran, but he did fully intend to rebuild his WMD program."
That turned out well. And the DPRK was watching. They know that they can't trust the USA to let them exist unless they are in a position to make them pay dearly for invading. Kim doesn't want to end up like Saddam or Ghadaffi.
The US won't attack the DPRK because it has enou
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Was it just last week some Russian official nailed it
No.
Any other silly questions?
Nothing Like War (Score:2)
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...stimulate corporate progress
Now we know what's going on - there's a company with some multi-billion dollar tech, there's the US government and a wonky foreign state. One tells the other to do something to the last one. We've been down this road before, and it didn't go terribly well.
Military intelligence (Score:2)
Someone needs to explain to the military how acronyms work.
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I still remember when a group out of UW's CSE tried to get away with referring to their project as "FRITTER", even though the first two words were "Radio Frequency".
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They know how acronyms work. That's why they didn't try to make us pronounce CEHPMAMP.
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If you want a sponge bath next then just ask nicely and wait. Maybe he'll be nice enough to sponge you off too when he's finished. His parents may be bed ridden so no need to be rude to the man.
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Lives are second shelf on the left if you ever decide to get one.
That'll blow their minds! (Score:2)
"wouldn't damage the buildings or cause casualties."
Unless a cooked brain is considered a casualty. Medium or well-done; how much does it take to disrupt neural pathways? How much does it take to disrupt circuit pathways?
The North Korean people are starving (Score:2)
So it would probably be just as effective to parachute drop a few hundred standard microwave ovens and several thousand cases of Marie Callender Pot Pies on the country.
While the people are busy eating, a special commando team could easily disable the rockets.
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So it would probably be just as effective to parachute drop a few hundred standard microwave ovens and several thousand cases of Marie Callender Pot Pies on the country.
Self-heating MREs will work a lot better, unless your plan is to blow out their electrical grid when all their citizens try to run a microwave at the same time.
B-2 Is Poor Choice In NK (Score:2)
North Korea has crazy anti-air defenses. All their missiles would be in the air long before the B-52s made it near the launch facilities. A first strike would involve stealth bombers. Now, if these cruise missiles were launched from the ground near the DMZ after their radar installations were taken out, that might make some sense... except the launch facilities are going to be a top-priority target, above radar installations.
Also, it's a bit of an assumption that their ballistic missiles are aimed electroni
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B-52 is poor choice in nk*
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NK has no airforce so it won't be like Vietnam. Stealth will remove all SAM before b-52 arrive over NK.
No need for anything fancy like Operation Bolo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Just keep the B-52 missions to a set and predictable 24/7 timetable. Just like stealth flights over Serbia.
Keep crews working with stop-loss.
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Also, it's a bit of an assumption that their ballistic missiles are aimed electronically rather than by turning mechanical wheels like old artillery.
An ICBM isn't going to get where it's going without electronics. It might get somewhere, but no guarantees it'll go where you want it. That kind of thing is sometimes acceptable with conventional explosives, but never with nukes.
Faraday cages are completely unknown in N Korea (Score:3)
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This weapon is useful against people who have progressed beyond purely mechanical/chemical weapons and are dependent on electronics... but who haven't quite caught on to shielding those electronics against EMPs.
I mean, anyone who has heard of nukes has heard of the EMP they generate that fries electronics, right? What's a tiny HERF weapon compared to that when you're talking shielding?
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I agree. If you can design something to withstand direct lightning strikes, like an aircraft engine and its control unit, then microwaves are easy in comparison. You dont even have to make it perfectly as at microwave wavelengths even a loose mesh appears like a solid conductor (see ovens)...
Sounds like another boondoggle.
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err, the target is systems with antennae...you know, the ones that have to emit and receive microwave radation
CHAMP? Really? I can play too. (Score:5, Funny)
I get the impression that the military just grabs words out of a hat for the next weapon system and makes up an acronym to fit. I can do that too.
High
Energy
Radio
Output
Emitter
System
or
Weapon
Intercept for
Nuclear and
Non-nuclear
Enemy
Rockets
Who else wants to try? Here's a tough one: VICTORY
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Vectoring
Interdiction
Counter-measure
Trajectory
Ordnance
Ranged
Yankee
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That's cute but I don't see how that describes a weapon system.
By The Way, Thanks for the Announcement! (Score:3)
microwaves (Score:3)
The US Is Testing a Microwave Weapon To Stop North Korea's Missiles
Has it been testing it in Cuba?
doesn't spell CHAMP (Score:2)
Counter-electronics High Power Microwave Advanced Missile Project =
CeHMPAMP
or at best
CHMAMP
At this point, why bother with matching abbreviations. Call it Big Microwave Shooter Missile, or CHAMP.
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..or just go with full-on propaganda - call it the PeaceMaker, or RainbowMaker or FluffyKitten, HammerDontHurtEm or BigHugs or some such.
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It seems like an unfortunate choice of name in any case: all it will take is one public failure in it's deployment (if it gets around to that) and it'll forever be known as "CHUMP".
Just more finessing (Score:2)
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I was wondering about "made up". This could be a fake story intended to get NK running around trying to make countermeasures to a non-existent threat.
Re: Somebody forgot what B in ICBM stands for. (Score:2)
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Not so sure about that, especially given it's North Korea, it might just be an electric detonation. A mechanical kitchen timer could be sufficient to flip a switch and is impervious to microwaves. Additionally, a missile is a Faraday cage and even if you take out sensitive electronics like GPS, simply reaching a target is sufficient for the regime, even if it's wildly inaccurate.
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It's just a bad story title. This weapon isn't intended to take out missiles, but take out the launch facilities before launch. TFS says as much too.
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But the ballistic missile is not ballistic until the engines finish propelling the warhead. During that time it needs it's electronics functional or it will not reach the target. That's why the weapon must be deployed within 700 miles of the launch site, to catch it while it's still under power. Beyond that range means the missile has gone ballistic, with a "B", and is no longer vulnerable to this weapon. That is unless the cruise missile doesn't just keep going towards it until they collide, which if t
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RTFA. It's not about killing the missile itself. It's about frying everything at the launchpad(s).
Re: Better ideas (Score:3)
Pakistan's already got nukes, you know.
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Look for Project 137. Task Force 88. Operation Argus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .
Lots of early thinking about how to shield the USA from missiles went on.
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The CIA will do a deal and offer an Operation Paperclip escape deal.
During the fog of war all the high ranking mil of NK will just get to escape. No courts, why go looking for people who all stayed in tunnels and caves at the end of the war?
Another Kunduz airlift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A nice big payment and a new life anywhere.
The only part of the deal the NK mil has to keep is not to
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And people make fun of me for building my anti-ballistic missile system. You'll thank me for it after I save the west coast from the North Korean nuclear fallout.
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It is highly likely that if NK, or anyone else for that matter, launches an ICBM the first one will get through, showing these missile defense systems to be useless.
Also MAKING them useless.
All they need to do is set off a small one (a few kilotons) at the right altitude (which they've already reached - and ORBITED SATELLITES) over the central US, to EMP the whole North American continent.
That's why it doesn't particularly matter that their first fission nukes were pretty puny. Puny fission bombs are good
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No, it wouldn't. Just like how a mirror doesn't defeat a powerful enough laser, because some of the energy still gets through.
I'm assuming the people designing the weapon thought of this. The skin of the rocket will presumably act as a Faraday cage on it's own. It will attenuate the RF but not block it all. Assuming the microwave generator is powerful enough then no Faraday cage could be made thick enough to defeat it and still be able to launch.
If for some reason the North Koreans are able to defeat th
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Maybe would actually work with flying saucers!
I have a Remington 870 loaded with bird shot for those. Microwaves don't work on those saucers at all unless they've got that old style gold paint trim on the edge to get them hot enough to crack while still flying through the air. Most saucers these days are microwave safe, they changed the chemistry in that paint now or something, best you'll get is a saucer that's a bit blackened and a chip from hitting the dirt. If you want to bust up some old saucers you've sent flying just use the shotgun. Trying
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Even a Fat Man needs electric components to trigger the initial explosion to trigger the bomb. However, the best thing would be to try diplomacy. Not Trump the lets pour oil in the fire diplomacy, real diplomacy is needed.