Posted on 04/18/2017 6:46:32 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
USSR at the peak of its power couldn’t even control Cuba.
You are partially making my point.
NK has literally nothing to lose. If they launch successfully, is that enough to strike back at China?
If Kim says he’s going to launch, do we simply take him at his word and strike first?
If we do, is that enough for China to strike back against us?
No. Big diff between a loose cannon and a nuke strike in your region. China won’t put up with that.
NORKS can’t hurt us yet.if we shoot down every test he can retaliate vs SK or China, but either would be suicidal.
Say you are right, and they can’t hurt us, and we are sure of it, but we shoot down their tests. They retaliate against SK.
Costs the US little, though the world is going to say we should have seen this coming. If half of the 63,000 artillery pieces on the DMZ work, the damage to SK is going to be substantial, though not permanent.
If they retaliate on the Chinese, that’s another matter. Nobody is going to cry much, given the Chinese gave them the weapons in the first place.
All of this hinges on the belief NK doesn’t have a nuke, and cannot deliver it. We better be right about this.
For artillery to be effective against Seoul they have to bunch it up at the DMZ. And most of that would still be out of range. Only the MRLS has the range to damage Seoul in a significant way.
Additionally, with immediate air supremacy, the US could drop thousands of cluster bombs from B-52s and B-1Bs in short order.
Artillery and rockets and armor are no match for the CBU-100 family of weapons. No match whatsoever.
Completely neutralized in a few hours.
If the NORKS believed China did not have their back there would not continue with the missile and nuke testing. If we launch a conventional attack imo china would not get involved unless we penetrated their border or if the NORKS used nukes or other WMDs. Hopefully not against our fleet as I suspect we would lose most of it and things could escalate further. This has similarities to 1950. We have minimal Intel. We are in Asia where we have been worned to stay out of land wars. We need for China to step up and take this state out. I wonder the cost for this politically and economically verses the military cost and danger.
. . . and people forget that it wasn’t that long ago (late 1980’s) that China was threatening to nuke Los Angeles and other cities on the west coast - now all of a sudden China is a good bud?
That is the crux of my fear. Kim can’t be completely stupid. The reason why SK has deployed a missile defense system is because they don’t trust the Chinese to defend their national interests.
In the Gulf War, a SCUD impacted Israel at one point, and we persuaded the Israeli’s not to retaliate, or enter the conflict. Israel stood down. They bought into the notion the US would defend their interests in that case.
Kim persists because he’s being emboldened to continue increasing the pressure.
Kim’s not persuaded by China, and neither is SK, yet we should be willing to leave the security of the US mainland and Hawaii to the Chinese being effective with NK?
Again, assuming NK 1) doesn’t have a nuke, and 2) can’t deliver it.
If the assumptions are correct, then China can act in our interests I guess. SK clearly doesn’t believe these assumptions are correct. Their intelligence services have an existential stake in being right about NK.
Haven’t heard anything about Japan deploying their missile defense system yet.
The argument is you can make a first strike and then defend against a retaliatory response. Guess it sort of makes sense in an insane sort of way, because Reagan offered to create the defense and share it with the rest of the world.
Economically, so much has changed for China. They really do need us in terms of keeping their bicycle economy afloat. They still have 29 ghost cities, where the entire city has been built, and nobody is living there.
They are a creditor of ours, but they have been selling off US debt for a while.
Xi is a different cat. China should be a world power, but they have 1.2 billion people to employ. They can’t print enough money to keep all those people fed and happy, which is why quite a few are trying to leave before it blows up.
Russia is holding a pair of 2’s economically as well. Balance sheet is a mess, and they are essentially a petrostate in a market where fracking has put many of their customers in a place where they can engage in something called tapered integration, where you continue to buy from your supplier until you no longer need them.
France has started fracking, for instance. So has Germany.
2008 did no favors. All of it was sparked by taking the Community Reinvestment Act to an obscene extreme. The CRA literally puts a gun to banks heads and makes them provide bad loans to diverse people and companies with little chance of paying it back. The audits are unbelievable, and very detailed. If a bank fails, not only are they fined, the news leaks and hits the bank’s goodwill. Not kidding.
2008 was such an avoidable affliction, and not much has been written or filmed about the effect of the meltdown on the rest of the world’s economy. It was bad here, it was so much worse everywhere else.
Then we had the temerity of suing Deutche Bank to the point of potentially closing their doors.
The rest of the world has a legitimate beef with the US. It explains some of the Obama apology tour, the immigration, and the rolling over that happened in the last eight years. I wouldn’t have done that. I would have crucified Warren Buffett and others in the public square instead, but that’s me.
They also have no standing to tell S. Korea not to defend itself if Fat Boy lobs a missile their way.
There are a million scenarios a day we “better be right about.” This is no different than assuming the Pakis have a stable government, or that the Indians don’t go all burning bohdi on us.
China is really afraid we will use the THAAD system to stop them from attacking Japan, if they choose to do so some day as a diversion from their internal economic problems. They don't like to lose any tactical options - even unrealistic ones.
One worry is the nature of the NK deep defense fortifications only 35 miles from Seoul. It would be a nightmare to assault conventionally. The heavy artillery is thoroughly dug in. It the NKs began firing on Seoul then it would take tactical nukes to silence the guns. And when that happens it’s anyone’s guess what follows.
...Right now it looks like they are leaning towards having us pay them to allow us to solve the lil Kim problem for them....
Like sending cousin Guido over to break his kneecaps?
“The last time I was in Seoul was the 90s and at that time it was a city of 10 million people, I imagine it is more now.”
The metropolitan Seoul area is just under 26 million people. If the NORKS started shelling the area they’d potentially kill millions before they could be stopped even if stopping them only took 20 or 30 minutes.
Imagine if they used chemical weapons. The Norks have at least 10,000 artillery tubes trained on Seoul not to mention (I think) short ranged Scud type missiles.
The Norks can’t really win a major war but they could kill a lot of people.
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