North Korea, claims they've successfully tested a Hydrogen bomb

[Werthead]

Kim Jong-un's brother - the dumb one who got arrested for trying to sneak into Japan to visit Disneyland - has been assassinated in Malaysia. His brother likely ordered the hit job.

Kim Jong-un ain't playing.

[Rippounet]

5 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Link that with "decapitation" strikes against as much of its senior leadership as possible. I doubt loyalty to the regime runs that deep, so once you have boots on the ground surrender will likely follow soon after. Most likely, they would take out Kim Jong Un themselves, to end the war sooner.

And what makes this different from Iraq, or Syria or Libya, is that you don't have a death cult as the prevailing religion of the area. The North Koreans won't become a new source of Jihadi's. Instead, they will just want to start a new life post-dictatorship.

That's a lot of assumptions.

Recent history has shown that if you're talking about invading another country you should assume the worst, not the best.
In this case, the worst would be to assume that a significant proportion of the North Korean population actually believes (on some level or the other) in the regime's propaganda and will be willing to fight invaders to the death, whether their leader is killed or not.
In fact I'd assume the regime has some sort of guerilla warfare plan in case of invasion. With some indoctrinated officers to coordinate an effective year-long campaign.

A bit off-topic but... When did people start systematically assuming that the population of an invaded country would welcome invaders as "liberators" ? At the end of WW2 it was widely recognized that at least part of the Japanese population would fight to the death and this is why the US did everything it could to avoid an invasion. But today it seems many people just can't believe that other peoples might actually fight for their land, for their religion, or their ideology. Is this an expression of Western arrogance, I wonder...

[Maithanet]

North Korea has nuclear weapons and intermediate range missiles.  It is possible that a surprise first strike could disable their ability to deliver one of their nuclear weapons, but it is by no means certain.  The idea that we should just accept a very real possibility of a nuclear attack on Seoul or Tokyo or both to "avoid a bigger problem down the road" strikes me as complete nonsense.  Even if we are lucky enough to disable thier lauch capabilities, the conventional artillery works, and there's plenty of it. 

So, best case scenario of a first strike, we're looking at tens of thousands of South Korea civilian casualties, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.  Worst case scenario, NK has a bit more nuclear capabilities than we'd thought, and Seoul, Tokyo and possibly a few other Japanese cities are nuked.  Tens of millions killed.

A first strike to destroy NK is a monstrous idea. 

[Free Northman Reborn]

2 hours ago, Maithanet said:

North Korea has nuclear weapons and intermediate range missiles.  It is possible that a surprise first strike could disable their ability to deliver one of their nuclear weapons, but it is by no means certain.  The idea that we should just accept a very real possibility of a nuclear attack on Seoul or Tokyo or both to "avoid a bigger problem down the road" strikes me as complete nonsense.  Even if we are lucky enough to disable thier lauch capabilities, the conventional artillery works, and there's plenty of it. 

So, best case scenario of a first strike, we're looking at tens of thousands of South Korea civilian casualties, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.  Worst case scenario, NK has a bit more nuclear capabilities than we'd thought, and Seoul, Tokyo and possibly a few other Japanese cities are nuked.  Tens of millions killed.

A first strike to destroy NK is a monstrous idea. 

Do you think the US doesnt know where everyone of North Korea's handful of nuclear warheads are? I'm guessing they do. This becomes impossible however when they have 50 or 100 warheads.

[Maithanet]

8 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Do you think the US doesnt know where everyone of North Korea's handful of nuclear warheads are? I'm guessing they do. This becomes impossible however when they have 50 or 100 warheads.

Apparently you are willing to risk the millions of South Korean and Japanese lives to find out.  I'm not, and I hope to god the President isn't either. 

[Kalbear]

Note that a war on North Korea - even in the 'best case' where Seoul is merely gassed to death and Japan is largely untouched - would be an astoundingly huge destabilizing event on the global economy as well as a humanitarian crisis not seen in 50 years. A huge amount of the technological and engineering world runs through Korea, and without it much of the economy will grind to a halt. 

[Week]

25 minutes ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Do you think the US doesnt know where everyone of North Korea's handful of nuclear warheads are? I'm guessing they do. This becomes impossible however when they have 50 or 100 warheads.

We know EXACTLY where the WMDs are!

http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/powellwmd.jpg

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

8 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

And what makes this different from Iraq, or Syria or Libya, is that you don't have a death cult as the prevailing religion of the area. The North Koreans won't become a new source of Jihadi's. Instead, they will just want to start a new life post-dictatorship. Most likely you will eventually have a German reunification type process in the decades following such a war, with Korea becoming one again, albeit with a massive wealth gap between the two halves. But that can heal, over time.

Right, because no non-Muslim group has ever caused an occupying army trouble.

[Relic]

Attacking North Korea is an insane idea. Would it not be a better idea to assassinate Dear Leader and try to negotiate with whoever takes over? 

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Relic said:

Attacking North Korea is an insane idea. Would it not be a better idea to assassinate Dear Leader and try to negotiate with whoever takes over? 

Doesn't solve the WMDs that they're holding, and chances are pretty good that whoever replaced them wouldn't be super happy with negotiating with the people who deployed the assassins. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

3 hours ago, Rippounet said:

That's a lot of assumptions.

Recent history has shown that if you're talking about invading another country you should assume the worst, not the best.
In this case, the worst would be to assume that a significant proportion of the North Korean population actually believes (on some level or the other) in the regime's propaganda and will be willing to fight invaders to the death, whether their leader is killed or not.
In fact I'd assume the regime has some sort of guerilla warfare plan in case of invasion. With some indoctrinated officers to coordinate an effective year-long campaign.

A bit off-topic but... When did people start systematically assuming that the population of an invaded country would welcome invaders as "liberators" ? At the end of WW2 it was widely recognized that at least part of the Japanese population would fight to the death and this is why the US did everything it could to avoid an invasion. But today it seems many people just can't believe that other peoples might actually fight for their land, for their religion, or their ideology. Is this an expression of Western arrogance, I wonder...

Yes it is an expression of Western arrogance. Its a foolish assumption that the citizenry is raised on, its an assumption that should be weened from our consciousness because its unrealistic and used to manipulate the public over and over.

[Werthead]

Lot of odd activity today. The US, Japan and South Korea called for the UN Security Council meeting (which happened behind closed doors) and got them to unanimously condemn the missile test. Even China and Russia agreed to condemn it, which is unusual (although not unprecedented).

Then Trump called Theresa May this afternoon for an official and sensitive telephone call. Shortly after the call ended the North Korean ambassador was summoned to the Foreign Office, presumably to have strips torn off him. Note that North Korea does not have an embassy or an ambassador in Washington, DC so the US usually passes messages on through third parties.

6 hours ago, Rippounet said:

That's a lot of assumptions.

Recent history has shown that if you're talking about invading another country you should assume the worst, not the best.
In this case, the worst would be to assume that a significant proportion of the North Korean population actually believes (on some level or the other) in the regime's propaganda and will be willing to fight invaders to the death, whether their leader is killed or not.
In fact I'd assume the regime has some sort of guerilla warfare plan in case of invasion. With some indoctrinated officers to coordinate an effective year-long campaign.

A bit off-topic but... When did people start systematically assuming that the population of an invaded country would welcome invaders as "liberators" ? At the end of WW2 it was widely recognized that at least part of the Japanese population would fight to the death and this is why the US did everything it could to avoid an invasion. But today it seems many people just can't believe that other peoples might actually fight for their land, for their religion, or their ideology. Is this an expression of Western arrogance, I wonder...

Your points are reasonable, but in the case of North Korea we are not flying in the dark here. The idea of North Korea being a completely sealed state and nothing gets in or out without the regime's permission has been oversold. Hell, you can even get a tourist visa and go and visit if you really want (as long as you don't start fucking around with signs and get arrested). Western news agencies get to go in and out of North Korea on a fairly regular basis.

Since the 1990s famine, North Korea has been existentially dependent on food imports and external aid. There was an excellent documentary a couple of years back in which a BBC journalist was shown a "state of the art North Korean tractor" by a government agent, which they'd forgotten to take the EU number plates off.

In particular, the Chinese border is quite vulnerable. Lots of material (including DVDs, newspapers, movies) are smuggled over the border with "authorised" Chinese imports (the border guards are quite eminently corruptible, unsurprisingly). North Korean exiles and expats, and South Korean sympathisers, smuggle material into North Korea quite regularly telling them how awesome the rest of the world is. The official North Korean government position is that Seoul was obliterated during the Korean War by the evil Americans and has never been rebuilt, which a lot of the people of North Korea know is absolute horseshit (anyone who lives within fifty miles of the border can see Seoul lighting up the horizon).

If the North Korean regime was to fall or the country invaded, yes, there will be some percentage of the population who will fight. But I don't think it will be vast numbers. Hell, I suspect that the second actual combat took place a large portion of the army would surrender or refuse to fight (especially after the inevitable aerial bombardment that would long precede any ground assault). A few years ago the North Korean army reduced height requirements for entry as too much of the population was malnourished from rationing, so they're not going to be the most formidable foot soldiers (especially when they've been told for years that the Americans are cowards who will run away at the first sign of trouble).

 

Quote

 

North Korea has nuclear weapons and intermediate range missiles.  It is possible that a surprise first strike could disable their ability to deliver one of their nuclear weapons, but it is by no means certain.  The idea that we should just accept a very real possibility of a nuclear attack on Seoul or Tokyo or both to "avoid a bigger problem down the road" strikes me as complete nonsense.  Even if we are lucky enough to disable thier lauch capabilities, the conventional artillery works, and there's plenty of it. 

So, best case scenario of a first strike, we're looking at tens of thousands of South Korea civilian casualties, and hundreds of thousands of North Koreans.  Worst case scenario, NK has a bit more nuclear capabilities than we'd thought, and Seoul, Tokyo and possibly a few other Japanese cities are nuked.  Tens of millions killed.

A first strike to destroy NK is a monstrous idea. 

 

There is no credible evidence that North Korea has managed to place a nuclear warhead on a missile of any kind. You can have primitive nukes and you can have missiles, but marrying them together is hard (the US and Russians took years to do it and had to put their best minds on the job combined with captured German scientists who'd spent years of effective R&D on the V1 and V2 programmes). If they had, they'd have said because they know as long as they haven't, they're vulnerable. The second that they put even a short-range nuclear missile on a submarine or truck launcher, it's game over for the United States or South Korea destroying its weapons in a first strike with no second strike retaliation threat.

North Korea's nuclear bombs so far have been massive things. They could drive them on a truck somewhere to detonate (maybe) but that is the current limit of their technology as Western intelligence believes it (and they've got North Korea's nuclear and missile sites under observation like a hawk). They could, of course, be wrong but it's unlikely. There's infrastructure and resources that go into this stuff which is very hard to keep secret.

So the primary threat of an imminent first strike by the US would be the artillery. That's 13,000 guns aimed at Seoul. However, only about 700 of them can actually hit the city, and none of them with any degree of accuracy. That's still a lot of damage and deaths that can be unleashed, but if the US is considering a first strike, mitigating steps can be taken. Destroying 700 artillery pieces in a first strike is more doable than 13,000. It'd still risk thousands of South Korean civilian deaths, of course, so the tactical assessment would have to be if it's worth it. The final decision would likely have to come down to South Korea: do they want to be living under the traditional guns of North Korea who can damage part of the city or a nuclear missile-armed North Korea who can nuke the city into oblivion at the whim of whatever nutcase is in charge?

Quote

 

Apparently you are willing to risk the millions of South Korean and Japanese lives to find out.  I'm not, and I hope to god the President isn't either. 

 

Fortunately Trump probably isn't looking for any kind of foreign military adventure to show he's a tough guy and also to distract from domestic problems and unify the American people behind his leadership.

He'd probably prefer they were brown Muslims, but taking out North Korea does have the advantage of not pissing off Putin too much and causing additional headaches for China. I think Trump really is considering military action against North Korea, at least as one of several options for foreign adventurism. Abe's also been a lot more aggressive in speaking out against the threat recently (possibly because he knows that North Korea cannot attack Japan - yet - and might want to consider action before that threat becomes real).

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

On 2/13/2017 at 7:32 AM, Werthead said:

The question is if the USA and its allies are willing to risk the consequences in order to lance the North Korean boil once and for all, or what will happen if North Korea does gain nuclear capability and starts using that to threaten its neighbours at a point when neutralising it is not possible without risking a nuclear war.

Sorry I don't have the time to write a longer, more nuanced response, but I actually think this issue isn't all that complicated, assuming one is willing to accept that sometimes the ends justify the means. The first things you have to do is assess the likely loss of life, and it would be catastrophic in all scenarios, and the likelihood of success. From my perspective there are four scenarios, which you've basically laid out, and I'll list them from least to greatest likely loss of life: promote internal strife in the attempt to collapse the regime, foster global cooperation and implement a tough sanctions regime that would sadly cause a mass famine, organize a first strike plan lead by the U.S. with Western and regional cooperation or do nothing and allow the DPRK to acquire long range nuclear capabilities. 

I find the likelihood of collapsing the regime from within to be unlikely. If it was a viable possibility it would have probably already occurred, as there have been several points in recent history where the DPRK was weaker than it currently is today. I'm also skeptical that this could be done in a timely manner, assuming it was possible. What's the point of a long term strategy to destabilize the country if the Government can achieve their nuclear ambitions before the collapse occurs? Now you can certainly try to destabilize the DPRK while also pursuing other means of thwarting their nuclear capability, but I don't believe it's a viable option on it's own.

The next option is to revisit the possibility of a major sanctions crackdown, and this would obviously require China's support. Assuming it is possible to get China and all the other major players on board with this, I believe this course of action should absolutely be perused. It would cause a horrific famine and destabilize not only North Korea, but China and South Korea as well, but this course of action has a legitimate chance to achieve the goal of killing the DPRK's nuclear ambitions while limiting the total loss of life (though said loss of life would still be massive and it would require the entire world to help in an aid package after the fact). 

The next option is a U.S. lead first strike. The pieces of information I lack on this course of action are "How long would it take to evacuate Seoul and other threatened areas in SK?" and "To what degree could an evacuation be kept hidden from the DPRK?" Assuming an evacuation could work, I think this is also a viable course of action, and still be viable even if an evacuation isn't feasible. The loss of life would be gargantuan, and this course of action would almost assuredly destabilize the region for the foreseeable future, but it may be a necessary sacrifice to prevent option four.

The final option is to do nothing and kick the can down the road. This is totally unacceptable. If the DPRK obtains long range capabilities allowing it to reach into much of the U.S., the West and other prominent nations then the likely fallout would be a global nuclear arms race to assure each individual country that they would had the MAD defense. Having an unstable, nuclear armed world provide the greatest likelihood that mankind destroys itself, and thus it's the course of action that has the highest likelihood for the greatest loss of life.

In short, I believe the best strategy would be to immediately pursue first option two and then option one. If there is no progress then option three has to be strongly considered, and ultimately implemented, as option four must be prevent at all costs.   

[Week]

52 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There is no credible evidence that North Korea has managed to place a nuclear warhead on a missile of any kind. You can have primitive nukes and you can have missiles, but marrying them together is hard (the US and Russians took years to do it and had to put their best minds on the job combined with captured German scientists who'd spent years of effective R&D on the V1 and V2 programmes). If they had, they'd have said because they know as long as they haven't, they're vulnerable. The second that they put even a short-range nuclear missile on a submarine or truck launcher, it's game over for the United States or South Korea destroying its weapons in a first strike with no second strike retaliation threat.

North Korea's nuclear bombs so far have been massive things. They could drive them on a truck somewhere to detonate (maybe) but that is the current limit of their technology as Western intelligence believes it (and they've got North Korea's nuclear and missile sites under observation like a hawk). They could, of course, be wrong but it's unlikely. There's infrastructure and resources that go into this stuff which is very hard to keep secret.

This is an interesting point that I have not seen much about. A bit of googling (linked below) seems to suggest that the DRPK's miniature warhead capability is somewhere between mildly rumored (probably false by DRPK) and a "prudent assumption" which has ominous echoes of Iraq WMDs. Have you have read any newer sources with commentary on the matter?

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/nuke-miniature.htm
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11813699
 

[Werthead]

50 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Sorry I don't have the time to write a longer, more nuanced response, but I actually think this issue isn't all that complicated, assuming one is willing to accept that sometimes the ends justify the means. The first things you have to do is assess the likely loss of life, and it would be catastrophic in all scenarios, and the likelihood of success. From my perspective there are four scenarios, which you've basically laid out, and I'll list them from least to greatest likely loss of life: promote internal strife in the attempt to collapse the regime, foster global cooperation and implement a tough sanctions regime that would sadly cause a mass famine, organize a first strike plan lead by the U.S. with Western and regional cooperation or do nothing and allow the DPRK to acquire long range nuclear capabilities. 

I think your analysis is mostly correct. Internal dissent is present in North Korea but it is very much embryonic. Internal riots and an uprising is possible to likely on a multi-generational level, but not imminently enough to prevent the country acquiring nuclear missiles.

There is also Option 5: China occupies North Korea and the country becomes a vassal to China. The former British ambassador to North Korea was just on the BBC saying he thought this was a possibility, as China would not want North Korea to destabilise the region and provoke an American attack. China does not want North Korea disrupting its incredible trade volumes with South Korea, Japan and the USA, but it also doesn't want the US to knock out North Korea and reunite the country under Seoul's leadership, right on China's doorstep.

Part of the problem here is that neither China nor South Korea necessarily want to occupy North Korea: they can't afford it. This isn't West and East Germany (the problems of which are still rattling along now), North Korea is generations less advanced than South Korea. It will cost trillions of dollars to bring North Korea up to the levels of the South and the potential for dissent and disruption would be immense. The addition of 25 million people with massively varying standards of education and work and life skills is something that South Korea would really struggle with (it'd tax China as well, although arguably they have greater recent experience of bringing millions of people out of poverty and finding them jobs over the course of a single generation).

Quote

The next option is a U.S. lead first strike. The pieces of information I lack on this course of action are "How long would it take to evacuate Seoul and other threatened areas in SK?" and "To what degree could an evacuation be kept hidden from the DPRK?" Assuming an evacuation could work, I think this is also a viable course of action, and still be viable even if an evacuation isn't feasible. The loss of life would be gargantuan, and this course of action would almost assuredly destabilize the region for the foreseeable future, but it may be a necessary sacrifice to prevent option four.

You don't need to evacuate Seoul. That'd be impossible on any of kind short-term timescale (there are 25 million people in the Greater Seoul Metropolitan Area) and even the relatively unadvanced North Koreans would notice. There are enough bomb and air raid shelters to hold more than twice the current population of the city (I'm a bit sceptical about that, but obviously that's twice what they actually need).

Obviously people would still die, but Seoul has been living under the threat of North Korean bombardment for almost seventy years. They have gas masks in subway stations, they have air raid warning systems, they do have some contingencies. But people will perish, especially if the North Koreans choose to use chemical weapons.

Quote

 

This is an interesting point that I have not seen much about. A bit of googling (linked below) seems to suggest that the DRPK's miniature warhead capability is somewhere between mildly rumored (probably false by DRPK) and a "prudent assumption" which has ominous echoes of Iraq WMDs. Have you have read any newer sources with commentary on the matter?

 

I'm not sure there is a comparison with Iraq at all. North Korea has test-detonated five nuclear weapons, showing considerable improvements in yield and capability each time (the last one may have been a hydrogen bomb, representing a massive increase in potential destructive power). It has test-fired ballistic missiles capbable of hitting most of the western Pacific. It has WMDs right now and is clearly building more. It's leader is also clearly unstable and unpredictable. North Korea, right now, is a major existential threat to South Korea and a serious threat to Japan. It has made few attempts to hide the fact that it is developing these weapons with the aim of threatening the United States (even if primarily as a deterrence). We also have to remember that the Korean War never formally ended (North Korea is still, technically, at war with South Korea and all the countries that invaded it as part of the UN coalition) and North Korea's official ambition remains the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under its control, by force.

If anything, it'd be too late to wait until there was incontrovertible evidence of North Korea mounting nukes on a ballistic missile, as the second they do that the United States loses effective first strike capability (a first strike which "minimises" - which sounds horrifically callous - civilian casualties to the hundreds or low thousands). After that point any military confrontation will have to factor in the loss of Seoul and potentially millions of lives, and the possibility of a nuclear attack on Japan or even Guam.

One of the worrying things that came out of the discussions with the North Korean deputy ambassador to London, who defected to South Korea recently, was his 100% conviction that Kim Jong-un would use nuclear weapons to defend his regime even if the regime looked like it was going to collapse anyway.

[Week]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

I'm not sure there is a comparison with Iraq at all.

I meant from a US justified preemptive strike (whether the intel is fake or assumed) - I do see your point here though.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

One of the worrying things that came out of the discussions with the North Korean deputy ambassador to London, who defected to South Korea recently, was his 100% conviction that Kim Jong-un would use nuclear weapons to defend his regime even if the regime looked like it was going to collapse anyway.

Pretty terrifying. 

[Horza]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

 

There is no credible evidence that North Korea has managed to place a nuclear warhead on a missile of any kind. You can have primitive nukes and you can have missiles, but marrying them together is hard (the US and Russians took years to do it and had to put their best minds on the job combined with captured German scientists who'd spent years of effective R&D on the V1 and V2 programmes).

This is a common assumption, but it hasn't been true for about forty years. The first US and Soviet bombs were huge things because they were doing it from scratch and testing multiple design hypotheses in the dark. The theory and practice of building a fission device has got a lot more efficient since then, ending the need to begin your program by rebuilding Little Boy and Fat Man. The Pakistani nuclear program - which the NK program drew on, courtesy of AQ Khan - first tested with compact gas-boosted fission devices and it's quite possible that the low yield of the first few NK tests was due to misfiring attempts to replicate this approach. If so, they appear to have gotten over the technical hurdles, and last year Kim posed with a spherical mock-up about the size of a finalised, nose cone-fitting compact fission device, and with mock up KN-11 IRBMs. What could it all mean?

That doesn't mean they actually have one that fits in a nose cone, but it's a strong indication that they are aiming for it, and they don't have to recapitulate the entire warhead family tree to get there.

---

Re: first strikes, invasions and all that, I can't see any of that going well long term unless China signs off on it, and they won't because they don't want a US-aligned state on their border and/or Korean reunification. As such, some kind of Chinese intervention in the event of a crisis seems really likely to me, not that that wouldn't be fraught as hell either. That might even be why Kim had his older brother bumped off last night...

 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

12 hours ago, Werthead said:

 

Fortunately Trump probably isn't looking for any kind of foreign military adventure to show he's a tough guy and also to distract from domestic problems and unify the American people behind his leadership.

He'd probably prefer they were brown Muslims, but taking out North Korea does have the advantage of not pissing off Putin too much and causing additional headaches for China. I think Trump really is considering military action against North Korea, at least as one of several options for foreign adventurism. Abe's also been a lot more aggressive in speaking out against the threat recently (possibly because he knows that North Korea cannot attack Japan - yet - and might want to consider action before that threat becomes real).

That's good. George W. Bush attacked the wrong country. 

 

[Werthead]

3 hours ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

That's good. George W. Bush attacked the wrong country. 

North Korea and Iran both massively stepped up their missile and nuclear programmes after GWB invaded Iraq, because the message seemed to be if you had WMDs you wouldn't be touched whilst if you didn't you were vulnerable. The failure of both Bush and Obama to attack North Korea after its first nuclear test in 2006 seems to confirm that. So Bush really didn't help the situation at all.

[James Arryn]

21 minutes ago, Werthead said:

North Korea and Iran both massively stepped up their missile and nuclear programmes after GWB invaded Iraq, because the message seemed to be if you had WMDs you wouldn't be touched whilst if you didn't you were vulnerable. The failure of both Bush and Obama to attack North Korea after its first nuclear test in 2006 seems to confirm that. So Bush really didn't help the situation at all.

Wait. So, the premise is that the US knew all along that there were no WMD's, but falsely cited WMD's as their casus belli, but the North Koreans figured those out and somehow concluded that if the US had actually believed it's lie it would have had the opposite effect?

That's...elaborate.