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North Korea's Secret Biochemical Arsenal
mattnyc99 writes "Popular Mechanics has an in-depth report on North Korea's biological and chemical weapons stock, which has been developed in secret and has gone largely unnoticed amidst the country's nuke threat. From the article: 'North Korea's Chemical and Bioweapons (CBW) program appears to be modeled on that of the former Soviet Union, which covertly constructed a massive biological weapons infrastructure within the shell of a civilian research organization called Biopreparat. Inside Biopreparat, the Soviets developed deadly agents that included weaponized forms of anthrax and pneumonic plague. Intelligence reports from the United States and South Korea list anthrax, smallpox, pneumonic plague, cholera and botulism toxins as leading components of North Korea's bioweapons projects.' "
"I suppose there'll be a war now, hm? All that running around and shooting one another. You'd think that sooner or later, it would go out of fashion."
- Londo Mollari
Great, one more country has one more way of killing several large number of people in one go.
One would think that sooner or later we'd stop this crap.
Sorry, just a little frustrated with the fact that every time I have looked at news the past week, there is killing and murder and unrest everywhere. Bah.
Funny... a bioweapons program in N. Korea? With nukes and everything? Real, tangible weapons of mass destruction? With a prosperous true democracy only minutes away? Where's the sabre-rattling? Why hasn't Colin Powell been dispatched to the UN? How come Condi's not talking about mushroom clouds?
Yeah, Iraq had nothing to do with Bush's daddy.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Popular Mechanics is known for its deep knowlege North Korean technology.
By the way Popular Mechnaics, where is my flying car or personal submarine?
P226
Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't popular mechanics have a feature article on Iraq's WMDs a few years ago?
Biological - Not really all that useful. There's too much danger of it infecting your people.
Chemical - Used to restrict the enemy's access to terrain which forces him to attack along routes you've selected or require him to attack wearing protective suits. Chemicals can also be used to "soften" a target before your own troops attack.
Nuclear - Big boom. Lots of damage.
So, I can see them working on chemical weapons and nukes. But biological weapons make no sense for them. Particularly when the "enemy" is only 10 miles across the border from them.
Come to think of it, i like biochemical weapons a lot more than nukes: this way, we can wipe our shitty selves out of this world while still maintaining it intact, since other life forms don't really give a shit to Ebola, AIDS or other dumb monkey weapons...
I don't feel like it...
Yet there it is again. More lying claims of WMDs designed to incite the US into waging an unjustified war against (insert country name here).
You'd have a point, except it is China, Japan and S. Korea making the claims. Are they all lying too?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Oh, please. The stuff we have stashed away makes standard weaponized anthrax and plague look like Romper Room.
Revolutionaries stand for the unconditional defense of the DPRK against US imperialism. Drive the US out of Korea!
How does their alleged stock ( in much the same vain as Iraq's alleged stock ) compare to the real stockpile that the US actively develops?
... ( and Dubya makes a fine goose ) ...
The simple fact is that all countries see these kinds of weapons as not only useful deterrents, but necessary deterrents. Consider, for example, how things would have played out differently if Iraq had possessed the nuclear ( or newkilla weapons as Dubya and half of the US pronounce it ), chemical and biological weapons that the US was claiming they had. The would have been no invasion, or if there had, there would have been very, very serious consequences, not only for US and coalition-of-the-killing troups, but for US citizens as well.
This is what proliferation is all about. This is why the US is so hypocritical when it demands that all others renounce WOMD, terrorism and such. They are the biggest perpetrators, and force everyone else's hand. Whether you agree with the politics of the other states involved or not ( and I'm certainly no fan of North Korea ), you have to look at it from their point of view. Having a US armed to the teeth with WOMD, and being the biggest terrorist around, it makes good sense to get some serious arsenal of your own. What's good for the goose
Let's not rewrite history. France and Russia were also convinced that Saddam had WMD. They just disagreed with the US on how to deal with it. And not from any sense of right or wrong but because they had significant "Big Business" interests in Iraq.
Where is that f*cking evidence...
The uber responsible goverment of USA sell that chemical weapons to Saddam to take down Islamic Iran Regime in 1980's. That chemical weapons used against Iran and Kurds sell by Rumsfield himself...
There was no chemical weapon production plant in Iraq, no one found it. If they found it where is the evidence ?
USA goverment broke down the IRAQ goverment, if you haven't got instant replacement, you cannot change goverment like this. Entire country will collapsed...
Current status of IRAQ was CIVIL WAR and this was generated by Responsible George W. Bush regime.
Pleas, do not F.U.D us. No one takes...
[My english is better than most other people's Turkish, so please point out mistakes politely. Thank you.]
An accidental outbreak of smallpox in your army and you're suddenly far more vulnerable than before.
Yeah! I mean if americans had listened to him, they wouldn't have even GONE to iraq. What a dumbass!
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
I really don't want to read in the news one day that North Korea has been systematicly poisoning our kids with Happy Meal toys fabricated from some sort of "new" plastic.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
North Korea's military capabilities (and in particular its nuclear, biological and chemical capabilities) are irrelevant, because they will never be used against NK's immensely richer and more powerful neighbours and rivals.
All that matters is what these capabilities are perceived to be, and how these perceptions are utilised in propaganda.
It is clear from history (particularly recent Iraqi history) that there are three possible scenarios:
From this, we can see that if NK wants peace, they need to appear to be in scenario 1 or 2, that is to say, to appear to have very few weapons or very many. Of these two options, the cheapest is number 1.
However, Iraq shows us that having no WMDs and not being a threat is no guarantee of not being perceived as a threat. Intelligence will simply be fabricated. There, option 1 is taken away from the NK régime.
This leaves scenario 3 (Cold War) as a way of securing peace. Therefore, the NK régime should logically build up as large an arsenal of dangerous weapons as it possibly can. Since war is bad for the world in general, it follows that all responsible world citizens should want the terrible NK régime to accumulate such a stockpile, as it is the only thing that will stop Washington hawks initiating a bloodbath.
Furthermore, the NK régime should build this stockpile as fast as possible, in order to shorten as much as possible the intermediate stage in which they have enough weapons to be presented as a threat, but don't actually have enough to defend the country.
The US military is tied up in Iraq maintaining the puppet state that it has established there, and public support for another aggressive war would be very low right now. If the NK régime waits another five or ten years, the US régime may have been able to recover from Iraq in financial, military and propaganda terms, and be ready to liberate NK by means of mass annihilation. For these reasons, rapid armament for NK is particularly urgent and important for world peace.
Yes, this is a major reason to have hope. It may be that NK already has enough conventional military capacity to be perceived to be too dangerous to attack. However, is it enough to stop the maniacs who smashed Iraq? I would advise NK to accumulate a bit more conventional weaponry, and perhaps make a nuke or two, plus several fake nukes. Bio-chemical weapons are probably not worth making, but they would benefit from publicly announcing that their agents have planted anthrax, plague, sarin gas, etc in remote-controlled devices in every South Korean city, and that these would detonate even if the US wiped out all NK artillery (and population) in a surprise attack.
Not hard to vaccinate your army against smallpox. I'd be surprised if even North Korea doesn't do it. It's not exactly a high-tech vaccine these days.
In fact, if you're a country looking to get rid of some "surplus" population, not to mention keep your military's grip firm on the populace, a carefully engineered outbreak wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. You vaccinate the folks you want to keep around, and let God sort out the rest.
Of course, North Korea's government seems to do just fine using famine as it is, so I doubt they really need smallpox. Why bother, when you can just starve the peasants into submission?
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I love how everyone shivers at how terrible and evil communist NK is. Their nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare programs ALL pale in comparison to our own. Our weapons grade corrosive sarin's dad could kick their sarin's dad's ass.
Um, yeah... except that we aren't living in cruel Stalinist dictatorship that's starving its people, running forced labor camps to control population, and threateningly launching missles at and over neighboring countries. The "Dear Leader" is an absolute loon in charge of a vast, starving, standing army. That army is regularly told that it's going to be attacked at any moment (since the Koren War isn't over, really). Much like Iran's regular references to wiping other countries off the map, NK is actively, regularly doing and saying really unsettling. Crazy crap. They counterfeit currency from all of the world and use nationally flagged vessels to carry heroin and other smuggled goods around the world so that the D.L. can buy contraband western niceties from the same western countries that he curses and with whom he makes bogus diplomatic agreements.
It's really not the same as a country, like ours, that regularly changes out its cilivian and military leadership and has tight military relations with more than one other country. NK's got a luke-warm relationship with the very parasitic NK.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's baffling to me why a country that has consistently and fairly been compared with Nazi Germany, to the point of concentration camps and illegal medical experimentation, has been allowed to exist for this long.
Because they have an enormous army and loads of missiles aimed at one of the world's densest population areas?
Just about every regime in existence thinks NK is a scar on the face of the world but no one is able to do anything about it.
You can make the same argument about pretty much any "first world" country. They all have problems - maybe health infrastructure problems, violence and other public service issues instead of low food provision, but they all have armies to march to war, weapons to shake and shields to thump on the ground. North Korea isn't much different in that regard.
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious