Slashdot Mirror
United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea
skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."
Can't we just measure Kim Jong-un and Obama's penises and get this whole thing over with already?
"North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' main land."
Given the success of their missile program so far, I think China should be more worried than the US - and that's assuming NK is aiming at the US.
#DeleteChrome
please deport the cute NK chicks b4 any war, kthxbye
Although the outcome of any conflict is pretty much assured to leave North Korea a pile of melting slag, I've got a 21 day holiday in South Korea planned for July, and hopefully most of it is still there when I get there :(
but why is this news for nerds? Looks to me like this will another political debate.
Yeah, OK.
north korea strikes first = loser north korea
I think they are just trying to posture before they make their demands known.
1) Season pass to Disney.
2) Candle lit dinner with Denis Rodman, Mickey Mouse, and Goofy.
3) Orgy with aforementioned individuals.
If their demands are met they will give up the nuclear arsenal.
If US would bombs the living crap out of NK, we will loose awesome pics of Kim Jong-un doing all kinds of awesome things.
I read in the world's most accurate and true paper, Rodong Sinmun, that glorious North Korea has been flying stealth alien saucers armed with beautiful nuclear weapons aimed at Obama's melon. The report is accurate, because it comes from an eyewitness account from Kim Jong-un HIMSELF as he flew around in a saucer looking at things. He finds Ohio wheat to be "quite mesmerizing."
Too bad you won't be able to see them!
Glorious Leader, I agree on a Single Nuclear Strike on US soil and only single strike, if it targets Jersey Shore.
Thank you.
"... commitment to protecting it is allies in the region"??? Huh?
North Korea is like the baby chihuahua barking at you from across the street, behind a 6 ft chain link fence, and tied to a tree. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Make em wet!
You also have to consider a big difference between WW1 and WW2: fear of communism. While almost everyone in France was in a patriotic frenzy before WW1, there were a lot of people that did not want to fight Germany for WW2 because fascism was seen as a good protection against communism.
Germany, Italy, Spain had fascists regimes. France spared a fascist coup in 1934 just because different fascists leaders could not agree with each others. Some where hoping that a war defeat would bring to France what a coup missed to achieve.
KJ Un has no exit. NK old apparatus (tied with China) certainly doesn't want the country to join the "West" (and having most of the commanders to pay for their crimes), and China certainly doesn't want NK to merge with SK (ie having an immediate neighbor that joins the "West" club). KJ Un studied in Europe, he is far from being stupid, he likes life, good food, women ... in other words he is definitely not as crazy as his late father, KJ Il. ...? Un wants to end that. And he doesn't have much choice considering the political+geographical situation. He pushes the apparatus to their limits, high pressure, and hopes this will lead to an opening. Either the internal apparatus breaks down, Un seize the opportunity to instill a Gorbachev like coup. Or a (arranged) war will actually take place - just to allow the US and SK to take over (NK army (ie generals) will give up quickly).
So what do you think? You really think KJ Un wants a war? Or keep living with that level of UN penalties, poverty,
--
And of course Eric Schmidt was in NK to talk about the Internet...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
One B2 bomber costs more than all of North Korea.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I'm So Ronery
So ronery
So ronery and sadry arone
There's no one
Just me onry
Sitting on my rittle throne
I work rearry hard and make up great prans
But nobody ristens, no one understands
Seems like no one takes me serirousry
And so I'm ronery
A rittle ronery
Poor rittle me
There's nobody
I can rerate to
Feel rike a bird in a cage
It's kinda sihry
But not rearry
Because it's fihring my body with rage
I'm the smartest most crever most physicarry fit
But nobody else seems to rearize it
When I change the world maybe they'll notice me
But until then I'rr just be ronery
Rittle ronery, poor rittle me
I'm so ronery
People who dislike confrontation tend to prefer methods of confrontation-mitigation that are themselves non-confrontational. Sometimes, this works....for example if you never provoke a confrontational person they often don't notice you and hence an unpleasant situation is avoided.
Obviously, the strategy stops working the moment you are noticed anyway. But people who have a distaste for confrontation convince themselves that they can end the situation by continuing to refuse to participate. Of course, in the real-world, this does not work, never can work, and never will work. Once a predator (of any species) has its eyes on you no amount of ignoring it will ever get it off your case. After that moment, your only option is to fight back (or at least credibly demonstrate that you are ready, willing, and able to do so).
The need to kill other people is unpleasant, and we are right to try and avoid it. But the cold-hard fact is that sometimes, those other people make that violence unavoidable. You and the innocent you protect will be a lot better off if you nip the problem in the bud, and that requires direct confrontation.
If they're stealth bombers, how will the North Koreans notice to get scared?
as a show of force... but who can see it?
are very good and widely deployed at and at approaches to US ports of entry. NK's nuclear device would very probably be detected well before it was close enough to do any prompt damage. Maybe they could detonate a device 1000km west of Hawaii as a fallout weapon, but I don't it's on for them to nuke NY harbor.
It's all just cannon fodder. North Korea doesn't want to go to war. Hell, their leader is infatuated with US culture just like his dad was. The only reason this is played up is to keep the war machine rolling. After the Cold War Washington has been inventing the "next big threat" in a effort to keep the military spending and subversions of right going. The only thing Jung is doing is to try and secure himself a seat at the big boy table. It's our politicians and media that fan the flame to get the shitizenry worked up that we "must fear North Korea!!!!" It's the next logical step from Afghanistan.
You know all the conflicts that the democrat White House was supposed to end? It's pure comedy gold when you hear MSNBC trying to now justify drone strikes and a ramp up for North Korea.
So we have the US complaining about NK posturing and trying to intimidate, SO what do they do, well exactly the same thing but this time it is ok because it is them. When will they learn they threatening countries is only a means to escalate the situation until an incident occurs.
This is normal Nork business and has been going on in various forms for longer than most Slashdotters have been alive.
Google "Blue House raid" for when they really wanted to stir shit.
The old way of keeping our gook (from han guk, in case anyone is curious) buddies in their box was USAF fighters sitting Zulu Alert with live nukes. Now we don't need nukes on the peninsula to use them.
If the North attacks using nukes or chems then it is fair and reasonable to wipe out its military, completely, using nuclear weapons.
Atmospheric testing conclusively proved limited nuclear wars are practical, and trained and protected troops can move and fight through areas which have been nuked if necessary. The modern armored personnel carrier and NBC protective systems are examples of tech made in response to the threat of tactical nuclear war.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Pearl Harbor
Nagasaki
Hiroshima
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_F-117A_shoot-down
More likely, a North Korean nuke would arrive in San Francisco in a shipping container.
^That.
Creating military formations that put soldiers with boots in front
Shutting off nation’s 14 lights at night so country is much more difficult to see
North Korean malls playing instrumental version of “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life” overdubbed with anti-U.S. lyrics
Strapping landmines to every North Korean citizen
Propaganda team Photoshopping an image of a muscular, shirtless Kim Jong-un putting the Statue of Liberty in a headlock
Mandating all citizens maintain a “victory dirt patch”
Reprinting every obituary published in American newspapers and adding at the end of each one, “We did this!”
Releasing several reports by the state news agency about how uneventful a day April 8 is going to be
http://www.theonion.com/articles/north-koreas-war-preparations,31794/
They’re rioting in Africa
They’re starving in Spain
There’re hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls,
The French hate the Germans,
The Germans hate the Poles,
Italians hate Yugoslavs,
South Africans hate the Dutch,
(And I don’t like anybody very much!)
But we can be thankful, and tranquil, and proud
For Man’s been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud,
And we know for certain that one lovely day,
Someone will set the spark off
And we will all be blown away.
They’re rioting in Africa,
There’s strife in Iran.
What Nature doesn’t do to us
Will be done by our fellow man.
-- Sheldon Harnick 1953
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
5 O'clock Charlie ain't scared of no invisible planes.
um like there it is....
F. U.
Tell it to the little kid that was me 35 years ago. Smartest kid in the class and chubby. It started in first grade when I whizzed through vocab. Scaled up to ostracism, getting chased, being beaten. Got jumped by guys with knives but luckily ran away.
The only thing that got people's attention was studying karate and breaking a big 6th grader's nose. Aside from that a glacier rock was my best friend at lunch hour. Sure I had some friends, other geeks. But it only really stopped after I got out of the public school system and commuted an hour away to a preppy private high school.
If you want to know why America sucks at least one reason is because of the utter wasteland of stupidity that is the public school and community of people going to it for 90% of the people, and the system refusing to beat down bullies while they're young. Law of the jungle? Gandhi? Fuck that. I still have trauma from when I was that little kid. Maybe you just didn't get bullied enough. Tell it to kids (not me thankfully) who have gotten rolled up in gym mats, suffocated and died.
I bet a huge proportion of slashdotters have been bullied like me. Fixing (neutering) bullies and rewarding fair play would do a lot towards fixing (neutering) our military-industrial complex and maybe even our money politics.
Like most things it's not that simple. At 13 I would've agreed with your final conclusion. Then I grew up and learned the world is more complicated than that. I've also worked with and taught HS kids, where I learned things get even more complicated when you know even more of the backstory. Bullying often stems from problems, many of them at home. Abusive parents, neglectful parents, absent parents, actual mental issues, economic problems, familial stress, physical injuries, drug and alcohol issues and many more things all can play a part.
Bullies are often not evil kids, and a countrywide reaction to bullies Hammurabi style would do an enormous amount of damage too, as would simply overlooking competence, however fair it seems. Yes, there are some kids who would stop bullying if they get punched in the nose but there are many more who stop bullying *you* and move on to a easier target, and that's obviously not an answer from a societal view of things, since not all those bullied can punch the bully in the nose. The best approach is not a blanket one, but one that would take bullies and send them social workers to figure out what the hell is going on to begin with.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
and if the un is at war with them who is at war with them.....and it is war buddy my Canadian granpa was there....
It's not stealth anymore, you just let everyone know, bastard!
Table-ized A.I.
The actual damage and lives lost due to a nuclear explosion are only a small part of the damage done. The psychological impact of someone detonating a nuclear bomb on US soil would be enormous.
Oh yes, the Americans showing of their typical military prowess... of bombing their ALLIES! Yes, good for you USA, you can bomb at will a FRIENDLY COUNTRY!
WTF? This is like showing how good a marksman you are in the trenches by shooting the guy next to you. That should scare the enemy? Maybe it the old Vietnamese idea, have the first row of your own soldiers cut their own head offs to show how though they are.
Show them just how crazy you are "we will kill ANYONE even ourselves!" and nobody will want to mess with you. (More likely reaction "good, fewer of them to fight" and how motivated are the guys in the second row going to be loyal now THEY are in the front row?)
And there is a serious note to this, during WW2 US bombers practiced over dry deserts and were amazed at how accurate they could bomb during day light hours. Then they were slaughtered over cloudy Europe bombing empty fields.
Nobody is impressed by a military exercise where it made clear to all that the blues are going to win this exercise.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
From the 1959 movie: "An impoverished backward nation declares a war on the United States of America, hoping to lose, but things don't go according to plan."
NK can't feed its people and they are starving. NK leadership is foolish, incompetent, venal, sadistic, ... To distract from that, what better way than to whip them up into a patriotic/militaristic frenzy and claim that the "real" reason things are terrible is that the U.S. intends to attack them.
Or ... Start a war, lose immediately, and get "postwar" economic aid to rebuild the country.
Or ... They truly [delusionally] believe what they say. Think "The Black Knight" from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" or Hitler in the bunker inventing mythical armies he no longer has to mount counter-offensives. [*]
[*] Disclaimer: Normally, I don't "play the Hitler card", but NK has certainly earned it ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
I live in Simi Valley, CA and notice the constant launchings of the various plane and rocket entities that operate out of the high desert in Lancaster, about 60 miles north. Over the last couple of days I've been noticing aircraft leaving vapor trails very high, at very high speed (much faster and higher than commercial craft) and leaving at intervals, most probably the bombers coming out of Edwards AFB located near Lancaster.
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
That the Russians has a near unlimited supply of poor untrained peasants to fling at the enemy on mass does not say much for their strategy. If Germany had not made the bone headed move to invade Russia at the onset of one of the coldest winters in decades, the war would have turned out much differently. You also forget the AIR POWER that the Americans brought to bear on Germany's manufacturing cities and supply lines. Without manufacturing, the German war machine collapsed. It was American technological might that saved the world in WWII, not Russian brawn, which only resulted in millions more needless casualties on all sides.
The Germans were using a new tactic never before seen in modern war, the Blitzkrieg. It took a good long time for the French, English, and others to figure out a way to counter this.
Trillions of dollars have been spent on defense since the inception of the B-52 bomber that has been in operation since the year referenced in its very name, and this is the tech that we whip out of our "advanced" array of technology to intimidate another country threatening to attack us?
Was the intent to trigger a flashback in the old-timers, and make them believe the Korean war was still going on?
I feel so much better about all that spending on stealth technology...to keep B-52s justified.
OT but I think WW2 is better served as an example of how well appeasement works.
Not entirely, it serves as an example of just ignoring a problem as well. Appeasement usually refers to the territorial claims of land in neighboring countries in the late 1930s. However issues with respect to treaty violations, re-armament in particular, were pretty much ignored in the early/mid 30s. Without the re-armament there would have been no appeasement.
Seriously. In south korea it is illegal to "insult the president", clearly not on our side with individual liberties. So why should I care what happens to their country? We have a defense department, our boarders are not in Korea. Fuck sending bombers, we should pull the fuck out of that country, and let them defend themselves.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The whole purpose of this was to convince South Korea that they don't need to build nuclear weapons of their own - a move that has overwhelming domestic support in South Korea.
While such a thing would be child's play for South Korea, such a move would more than likely lead to Japan developing a nuclear arsenal (don't let the hype fool you: the Japanese aversion to nuclear weapons is mostly generational and dying off fast, and Japan is considered a de facto nuclear state as they could produce over 1000 weapons in the under a year). China then increases their arsenal to compensate... you can see where it goes from there.
So the message is, "South Korea: we know you hate the US... but we will protect you anyway." Please resist the temptation to develop nuclear weapons... because then we might have to target you as well. And allies, even erstwhile allies such as yourself, are hard to come by.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You can just look up in the sky and point. Hey there goes that stealthy bomber.
Let's hope the attack happens after Tuesday. I need more birds to eat. =[
So Iraq allegedly maybe might have WMDs or are attempting to maybe start developing them maybe so we invade. North Korea has nukes, says they will use them on us (or pathetically attempt to with some wooden model rocket or whatever, lol) and we don't really do anything but try to scare them. Well guess what, you can't scare crazy. You can certainly bomb crazy though. Why not pick a random, empty target inside North Korea and blow it the hell up? That'd be a pretty strong show of force and you know they'd never do anything. Even the most isolated country knows we'd completely fuck them up in any war.
How are they supposed to see them and get intimated if they're stealth?
At first they were thinking of nuking Detroit, but then they realized that no one would notice the difference.
I am officially gone from
I've been to the Nuke museum in Hiroshima, Japan. They have USA DoD declassified documents from the time of WWII which discuss the decision to drop nukes on Japan. The US DoD state that Japan was on the verge of surrender to Russia, who was negotiating a conditional surrender at the time of the bombing. In the end, the nukes were dropped to force an unconditional surrender and to short circuit a Russian backed peace agreement. The American DoD documents from the highest officials are clear about this, despite the protest of many people in the gov at the time.
As an American that was an eye opener. We were always taught that it was done to save the lives of millions of Americans who would have died in a ground invasion of Japan. There was no mention of Japan being on the verge of surrendering to Russia at the time of the bombing.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
It's a classic case of 'suicide by cop'.
Dude's got the country so fucked up, he knows it's over. And he's crazy enough to try to take the rest of the country with him into oblivion rather than see Korea united and westernized. As a bonus, an attack by the US would help to polarize its opposition.
Seems like a case where it would clearly be in the best interests of the rest of the world for a North Korean group of malcontents to take matters into their own hands and rid their country of this psychopath. If they were trained and resourced by US interests, well... who needs to know about that?
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
Look a man in the eye, then kill him. No other way. Killing people any other way is genocide. Your legacy will show you a coward. Villains and their families won't back down from drone-murder. They will relocate to colorado and blow up your church. Tell your leaders you don't want drones.
Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets.
You post is incredibly inaccurate and shows you have a basic grasp of World War 2 history. The Soviet Union was only able to survive because of the other fronts Hitler had lost to the Allies. He had to refocus his defenses and this allowed the Soviet Union enough breathing room to regroup and counter. Also, the success of the Soviet Union in WW2 was mostly because of logistics. Their trains, trucks, and fuel all came from the United States and the UK. Without any of that, they would have lost. They had NO WAY to moving any equipment around their country at the time of Hitlers invasion. Also, you are so wrong about the Pacific front that it is not worth responding to you about.
In short, go read a history book.
The real threat in this crisis is non-nuclear - it is a massively scaled, massively distributed artillery net that North Korea has assembled on the border since the cessation of hostilities at the end of the Korean Conflict.
An estimated 13,000 pieces of 170mm self-propelled artillery mixed with 240mm long range rockets are pointed almost exclusively at Seoul, in an overlapping criss-cross firing grid. It is believed that North Korea could saturate Seoul with > 10,000 rounds per minute of sustained artillery fire. These M1978 and M1987 artillery units have an effective range of 40 miles, placing the entire 10.4 million population of Seoul well within their reach.
The widely distributed nature of North Korea's artillery deterrent makes it highly problematic - unlike a nuclear facility, airfield or military base that can be bombed or saturated with cruise missiles, the artillery installations are strung across many miles. The entire nature of this problem makes destroying them without massive retaliation, or interception of their projectiles on any meaningful scale entirely impossible.
North Korea does not need a handful of nuclear warhead sitting on rickety, innacurate rocket boosters. It has something far, far better - and the effect of their artillery net being unleashed would be nuclear in scale to Seoul. Worse than one or two low-yield detonations would be the rain of tens of thousands of high explosives across the city that would continue unabated. The attack and devastation would take minutes - the South Korean & US response would take far longer.
North Korea cannot win a protracted war. They don't have to. A devilish combination of Seoul's location so close to the border and the North Koreas' Stalinist obsession with high speed, high caliber artillery en masse has put nearly 11 million people in Kim Jong Un's crosshairs.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
I believe that N. Korea is going to be the cause of a nuclear war in the next five years.
All the anger of the world is directed towards some happening and this will probably be it.
Regards.
We worry that other countries will have nuclear bombs, but we've proven our Godless leaders are capable of USING THEM. Things that make you say hmmmm....
Bullying often stems from problems, many of them at home. Abusive parents, neglectful parents, absent parents, actual mental issues, economic problems, familial stress, physical injuries, drug and alcohol issues and many more things all can play a part.
As someone who was repeatedly attacked and harassed and threatened - I see nothing has changed. You fucking teachers and administrators still feel perfectly justified telling a victim of violence, a child no less, that they must endure it for the sake of the person that just attacked them.
Do you have ANY idea how that makes you feel?
Please help metamoderate.
Existing military technology like nukes, plagues, and bureaucracy, are so powerful that they could greatly harm most human life on the planet. What kinds of plagues does north Korea got? Do we really know? I worried about the same thing when the USA invaded Iraq. Plagues are the poor man's WMD. The USA got lucky with Iraq in that we did not see hundreds of millions of US casualties on US soil from a plague launched by Saddam when things looked bleak for him personally and billions more casualties globally among those on the sidelines.
Soon enough, cheap military robotics (flying mines), nanotech, cyberwar, and other things will add to that list of massively harmful possibilities which we have, at best, limited defenses against at the civilian level and could thus completely disrupt our infrastructure in a place like the USA. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
As in my sig, the biggest challenge of the 21st century is technologies of abundance like nuclear energy and biotechnology and so on can be made into powerful weapons or they can be used to bring material abundance for all. The increase in powers of our technology are making the Earth seem smaller and smaller relative to the capacity for either governments or individuals to do harm. Modern technology requires us, if prudent, to both expand into space and to come up with better ways of living together on Earth.
http://globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Because the US military has not yet integrated this truth into all their doctrines, they still seem to think they can "defend" the USA against an (apparently) crazy person by a show of force, as with these bombers. That does not work that way if the person is crazy enough or if the local social dynamics is crazy enough to force a leader on to ever more aggressive actions. Just look at the US financial meltdown to show how individuals or collectives can deny reality for a long time or can take great risks (Enron) and so eventually destroy themselves while greatly harming the lives of everyone around them.
That is why the USA needs to rethink its security policy along the lines of mutual and intrinsic security. Thus:
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2011/09/paul-fernhout-open-letter-to-the-intelligence-advanced-programs-research-agency-iarpa/
"Especially in conjunction with an exponential Moore's law, it feels like there has been a systematic global intelligence failure to connect the dots about exponential change and present that information to decision makers in a persuasive way."
There may be no good way to deal with this situation. As with most disease (including mental illness) it is best to avoid it by healthier global living.
http://www.changemakers.com/morehealth/entries/health-sensemaking
One other idea by me though -- to airdrop millions of small cell-phone or tablet-sized mesh-networked solar-powered computers into repressive countries:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192755&cid=15823703
Total cost: $1 billion to transform North Korea into a connected place. Or about the cost of one of those bombers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit
Not saying it would work for sure, but at least it is a different option.
Remember: the people of oppressive regimes are generally suffering a lot too. Why make them suffer more just to get the leadership to change? That tends rarely to work anyway (for example, Cuba or Iraq). Any external threat just tends to make collectives pull together and silence dissent -- just like happened in
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.