Posted on 04/06/2012 8:59:05 AM PDT by Fennie
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has ratcheted up his regime's militaristic rhetoric as Pyongyang threatened to retaliate against any country that intercepts a North Korean rocket booster or collects the rocket debris.
The North has vowed to launch a rocket sometime between April 12 and 16 to put an earth observation satellite into orbit, a move widely seen as a pretext to disguise a banned test of its ballistic missile technology.
The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea in Pyongyang warned that interception of the satellite would be "an act of war" and would cause a tremendous catastrophe.
(Excerpt) Read more at koreatimes.co.kr ...
A very bad time to have BO as POTUS!
They would attack South Korea anyways, regardless. DPRK would Scud missile US bases in South Korea. And then they would almost simultaneously Scud or Nodong US bases in Japan as well. Probably with chems and bios. By that factor alone both S Korea and Japan would become immediate war parties. Whereupon China would also enter. It would not be that easily delinkeable as you suggest. In fact oddly enough it would mean an automatic abrogation of the 1953 Armistace agreement and would defecto be a resumption of hostilities of the DPRK and PRC vs The United Nations. Plus S. Korea and Japan though they were not original 1953 signatories. We are still technically at war with North Korea. This would just suspend the ceasefire.
Has anyone ever told you that you ramble too much?
Your position is that of the typical liberal coward.
North Korea has to be spanked.
This means one thing, and one thing only:
NK realizes if they launch, they may be intercepted.
No more than that.
Standard, Pegasus, or a rail gun could be equally effective.
Paging USS Ticonderoga, USS Ticonderoga, please.
Now, now, Tiger. How would that look on our Nobel laureate's resume? Although it would get him, within about 48 hours, a third of the way closer to his goal of being the first "nuclear-free" President of this century. (The last one was Herbert Hoover, or arguably FDR -- it would be a judgment call.)
And we wouldn't have to worry about Chinese hackers and Chinese dumping any more.
We cancelled it after they announced the launch.
North Korea doesn’t have a blue water Navy. All our Navy has to do is stay out of their operating range.
Our range will be great enough to deal with the problem, if needed. And the Norks will be too far away to do anything. Well, anything to us... excepting our USFK forces.
China is the puppet master in everything that North Korea does. China uses North Korea to gain negotiating leverage against U.S. allies, while preserving a degree of deniability. The U.S. should eliminate this deniability. U.S. policy should be to treat any North Korean action as an action of China, as China's responsibility. For example, if North Korea uses chemical weapons against South Korea, then the U.S. will act as if China had used chemical weapons against South Korea. The U.S. should state this policy publicly so that all concerned, including China and the U.N., for example, are aware. There are International Law problems with ignoring a sovereign entity, North Korea, but this is a necessary step.
North Korea has over 10,000 prepositioned artillery pieces ready to fire on Seoul in less than 5 minutes. And in case you’re wondering about a pre-emptive strike on them... they are all built into mountain/hillsides, protected from aerial strikes.
60+ years gave them a lot of time to construct protection for their first-strike capabilities.
If the balloon went up, Seoul would be completely destroyed in the first 10 minutes of the war. And half of the entire population of South Korea lives there... or in it’s suburbs.
That’s 26 million out of approximately 52 million South Koreans.
There’s no good options with North Korea except possibly an assassination... or perhaps bribing the top, non-Kim family, military members to revolt.
My concern is there are people who are seriously underestimating the damage North Korea can do. We need to count the cost before acting.
You may consider facts to be rambling. Your choice.
In analyzing any military threat, we need to take into account both capabilities and intent. Intent is extremely difficult know in what is one of the most reclusive and notoriously unpredictable states in the entire world, but we do know they have the capability to do tremendous damage.
Anyone who has spent very much time watching North Korea knows they routinely yell and scream and threaten. Yeah, I get that point.
Hitler also liked to yell and scream and threaten, most of Europe didn't take him seriously, and when he proceeded to do precisely what he had said years before he planned to do, lots of people were shocked that he actually meant what he said.
Granted, North Korea does not have the capability today of launching a German-style blitzkrieg, largely because of a much stronger South Korean military than what existed in the 1950s. I realize they can't do today what they did in the Korean War by overrunning most of South Korea before the United States could respond.
What they are capable of doing is inflicting massive damage to South Korea via artillery, even with their outdated weapon systems, and with their missiles they have a good chance of being able to strike American military targets in Japan. The result of even a fairly limited attack on South Korean industrial targets and cities would be massive damage to South Korea and major damage to the world economy. The prospect of a successful missile strike not just on American military targets in Japan but also on Tokyo is too awful to contemplate.
What scares me about North Korea is that in the past, we could influence them to some extent through China, though China always downplayed how much influence they had over Pyongyang. At this point the new North Korean dictator seems to be ignoring China, and seems to be engaged in an effort to assert control over his own generals.
In a situation like this, all bets are off.
My hope is that the North Koreans will do something that annoys the Chinese so much that they decide not just to spank the North Koreans but to remove the North Korean leadership. The Chinese are probably the only ones capable of doing that without a full-scale war, and considering that they have an heir-apparent scion of the Kim dynasty sitting in Macao, it wouldn't surprise me if they have contingency plans for precisely that purpose.
“the “satellite” will never get off the ground, so why is he stressing about it.”
I will do you one better. Don’t launch and say that you did and the running dog imperialists technology was too antiquated to see it.
I am sure Hillary and the State Department with the aid of the media report this.
“Most Emergency Action Messages are drills for nuking North Korea. The contingency plans are for a massive strike of every city and every military installation simultaneously. Very, very little of North Korea would remain.”
I slightly disagree — only Pyongyang and 3 or 4 key ports need to be taken out....
“If I were the American president I would go ahead and intercept it.”
With what? AEGIS? Physics problems.
Airborne Laser (ABL) has been put on the shelf.
I agree. The Kims have already destroyed the rest
He does realize that if he does something really stupid, Pyongyang could be turned into a large glass bowl...right?
Right?
“He does realize that if he does something really stupid, Pyongyang could be turned into a large glass bowl...right?”........................................... That would be bad, where would all the massive parades go? Especially all those sexy female soldiers? Maybe they’ll march to China where they could be put to use?
The range of the Sang-O class submarine is 1500 nautical miles. That puts all of Japan and Okinawa in easy range. Likewise, ships that would fire anti-missiles would most likely be in range of those submarines.
And in addition to carrying wake homing torpedoes, they are also capable of laying mines in some very busy sea lanes.
Remember that these are the people who sank the Cheonan, so they have very little hesitation about attacking us, especially while China is more than willing to support them.
I hope American teens reading “The Hunger Games” see the parallel between the world of the Hunger Games and any totalitarian communist country in the world today. The Capitol: the city where the “elite” rulers and a fawning populace live: well fed, decadent, silly people who live for entertainment and support the “President”,and the harshly evil oppressor President and his “Peacekeepers”, and in contrast the Districts: oppressed/enslaved areas of the country that earlier rebelled and now must work as impoverished half starved slave labor in mines, farms, etc to supply the Capitol.
I have no idea if the majority of teens do get it, or if it’s just the latest fad to them with romance and an exciting story. I hope some see that it may be our future here if we don’t turn this country around.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.