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.' "

Comments

To quote from B5

[metlin]

"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.

What about my flying car?

[Fysiks Wurks]

Popular Mechanics is known for its deep knowlege North Korean technology.

By the way Popular Mechnaics, where is my flying car or personal submarine?

i actually like the idea

[namekuseijin]

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...

Re:Hmmmm... Where's Bush on All This?

[Lord_Slepnir]

The difference is that North Korea has China backing them up. I assure you that if, say, Russia (or any other real threat) had backed up Iraq, we would have stayed out.

Although, China has been making moves to distance themselves from N.K. recently. but until they do, they'll be off limits. Both of my grandfathers fought in the last Korean war, and as one of them put it "Frequently, we'd run out of machine gun bullets before they ran out of troops to throw at us"

Re:Different uses.

[endianx]

Biological - Not really all that useful. There's too much danger of it infecting your people. Not a problem if you don't care about your people.

Re:Sure...

[ArcherB]

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?

Compared to, say, the US ...

[vandan]

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?

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 ... ( and Dubya makes a fine goose ) ...

Re:Hmmmm... Where's Bush on All This?

[meringuoid]

we have the same intel on N. Korea that we have on Iraq

I must have missed the memo. When did Saddam Hussein announce the successful test of a nuclear bomb, and when did seismographs worldwide confirm this?

Re:Hmmmm... Where's Bush on All This?

[Citizen of Earth]

S. Korea is basically a hostage (well within missle range), and Seoul with its ten million or so citizens will likely face annihilation should hostilities begin in the region.

Seoul is within *artillery* range of NK and NK has the capacity to bombard it with hundreds of thousands of rounds of artillery *per hour* until that capacity is destroyed. On the first day of fighting, there would probably be more than a million SK casualties. And these would be *first-world citizen* casualties, not third-world casualties taht nobody cares about. This is why there has not been and will not be an invasion of NK. The costs would be too high, even if NK didn't have nukes or bio-chems.

Re:Hans Blix to the rescue

[crabpeople]

Yeah! I mean if americans had listened to him, they wouldn't have even GONE to iraq. What a dumbass!