North Korea Jamming GPS Signals In South Korea

Fluffeh writes "North Korea has been looking for new and inventive ways to mess with South Korea. It seems that their missile launch fizzled a bit though, so those wacky folks from the North have bought a few GPS jamming trucks from Russia and are now blocking GPS signals around their city of Kaeson. While Kaeson is around 60 Km inside their borders, the jamming circle is around 100 Km, so it actually covers good parts of South Korea including the airports at Inchon and Gimpo. While no accidents have been caused as yet, it has caused quite some disruption and has made ocean going craft suffer as well due to their heavy reliance on GPS signals."

Comments

Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Noob question here: apart maybe from frequency allocation, is there an international law or equivalent regulation on signal jamming?

Re:Legality?

[Anonymous Coward]

International law only works if backed up by threats of punishment if you don't comply.

And this is why American foreign politics are not taken seriously.

Let's not be naive here. NK is a bandit state that follows and discards laws and regulations on a whim and in a seemingly irrational manner to an outside observer. Still, smaller countries (Scandinavian countries for example) have seen great successes in frequency allocation agreements through such organizations such as HFCC against a number of larger countries. I remember the Norwegian delegation some years ago negotiating away -China- from a critical allocation they both needed. This was done through careful diplomacy, some clever alternative arrangements and generally both parties being interested in a solution even if they were miles apart on the issue to begin with. The next year, they did it again, this time fending off Russia. Anyone suggesting that Norway has anything to threaten Russia and China with is an armchair general not to be taken seriously.

Whether the same could be arranged with NK... I remain sceptical but to dismiss it off-hand is foolish. You seem to have a very ingrained mental image of NK being the very soul of evil and the US being the shining city on the hill, never acting in bad faith. This image is incorrect on both accounts.

Personally, I'd think an invitation into HFCC and serious negotiation from equal parties is the best option likely to succeed. If not, and NK would be bluffing, THEN you would be in the situation where other options could be considered.

tl;dr - You're too gung-ho. There ARE institutions to handle this sort of thing. I've served on several and we've done some very good and difficult work deemed "impossible" by the US State Dept. because they only really have a hammer and not every problem is a nail.

Re:Legality?

[d3ac0n]

Well, that guy or not, you are (sadly) correct. China has far too much economic influence in the world for any nation (even my much beloved USA) to stand up to them.

The Norks, on the other hand, hold no such distinction. The only reason they haven't been stomped into the ground yet is both their proximity to China (China doesn't want a war in it's back yard and all the Nork refugees that would come with it) and the fact that they really are that unimportant in the world.

Of course, should they actually get a viable nuke missile program off the ground AND the USA gets a president with some backbone (Unlike the current "teleprompter-in-chief") then something might be done about it. Maybe. At the rate China is divesting itself of US Bonds, the US won't owe them much debt fairly soon, and will be more free to act.

The next several years should be "interesting" to say the least.

Re:Legality?

[rahvin112]

So much Fail.

The Reason the US doesn't attack North Korea is twofold. The first being NK presents no tangible threat to the US. They've been trying to build that threat so we will take their threats seriously (and give them what they want) but they continue to fail at ICBM's. Second reason is that NK has about 50,000 ordinary artillery pieces within range of Seoul, a city of more than 10 million. Within 5 minutes NK could kill several million people with conventional artillery barrages. There is no doubt in anyones mind that if it came to war SK could at this time decimate NK, but the cost to SK would be VERY high (millions of casualties and decimate their industrial might). This is partly the reason the US troops stationed in SK are now several hundred miles from DMZ with the SK army taking the lead point of defense.

Now on to the History. China didn't give two wits about NK and certainly didn't invade and defend NK for the silly reason of a united Korea with US backing (Sino-US relations had always been reasonable up to that point, even under the Communists and the US acting like babies about Commies). China invaded for several reasons but two are the most important. The first is that after Patton launched the amphibious landing behind NK lines and decimated the NK Army he started talking about not stopping at Pyongyang and continuing on to Beijing. (Yes, he did talk publicly about invading China). This brings up the second reason, because of Patton's statements the Chinese issued an ultimatum to the US that if UN forces approached within 300 miles of the Chinese border that China would be forced to retaliate. Patton and the US ignored the warning and proceeded on to within IIRC about 50 miles of the border (and ran right into the 300,000 troops China had snuck into NK). Patton was fired after this, partly for his failure to take the Chinese threat seriously and partly because he started publicly talking about Nuking Beijing as retaliation. The rest is history but to sum up, the reason China invaded was because they believed that they were under threat from invasion if for no other reason than the top general of the UN forces was talking publicly about doing it. The Chinese believed they were defending mainland China from invasion by US forces.

GPS reliance

[Savage-Rabbit]

While no accidents have been caused as yet, it has caused quite some disruption and has made ocean going craft suffer as well due to their heavy reliance on GPS signals.

It's amazing how many pilots/captains have completely lost the ability to navigate their vessels without electronics and the problem is made worse by the fact that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled in many countries. I have sometimes wondered what effect it would have on a major NATO military maneuver if you specified half way through the war-game that: "The enemy just knocked out several of our GPS satellites, please simulate this by not making any use of your GPS equipment nor any GPS enabled munitions except those that have a fallback mode".

Re:GPS reliance

[phaunt]

The GP's point still stands. He mentions "that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled". This includes lighthouses, many of which are no longer being maintained. I find this a bad idea: they offer a globally distributed and resilient fall-back option to the much more centralised (almost single-point-of-failure) technology that GPS offers.

Tim Burton Movie Fodder

[retroworks]

Now that he's finished "Dark Shadows", and in the spirit of "Mars Attacks!", and Edward Scissorhands etc., we really need Tim Burton to do a movie about North Korea. I think he could capture the ethos.