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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."
Who do you think the stealth bomber runs are done to impress? CHINA!!! Sure, Kim Jong Un might know about them and use them as propaganda, and it might scare him a little that he can't see the things on radar, but my guess is that we're really trying to impress China. I'm sure that the island is right at the edge of their early warning radar coverage, and if we slip in and drop the payload without raising an alarm (with a bomber that we designed in the 70's no less...) China will sit up and take notice. The Chinese are the only ones in a position to twist Kim's arm hard enough to make him stop acting like a four-year-old, the Chinese are the ones that we are trying to scare.
FWIW North Korea tends to get more and more aggressive until there is a response. If this doesn't work, they'll start shelling an island, or try to sink a ship. Better to send them a message before they get too crazy.
The response here is probably a good one. Fly a few planes around. It serves little military purpose to let your enemy know you've been doing practice bombing runs. But it's a decent way to send a message to North Korea, "stop being annoying."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
France and England gave Germany a lot of slack in the lead up to WW2. Europe suffered so many casualties in WWI that it decimated a generation and made most countries in Europe very war shy. Consequently, when Germany began openly flaunting the restrictions that had been place on it after WWI in the Treaty of Versailles, making demands, and annexing other countries, France and England compromised, made concessions, and offered little real resistance besides formal protest. They hoped by appeasing Hitler, they could diffuse the situation and avoid another full scale war, which worked well obviously because only 60 or 70 million people died during WW2.
None of their recent threats have been at South Korea
Other than the part where they talk about turning SK into a "sea of fire" and about "raining bullets on them" etc. Have you not been paying attention?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
They test every ship with a geiger counter. The containers with the nuke would be found very quickly.
Uranium-based nukes are not sufficiently radioactive for that. The metal itself is a weak alpha emitter. That alone can be blocked with a mere sheet of paper. But the bomb is enclosed in a metal casing that absorbs pretty much everything. Given the size of the bomb and the size of the available volume for concealment, you could even shield a gamma emitter with enough lead, and nobody would know.
To further complicate your inspection job, container ships are loaded so much that you cannot even access containers inside the stack until the ship is at the pier and cranes are working on it, layer by layer. By then it's kind of too late. You could try inspections at the port of origin, but that is hard - you have no rights there, on the foreign soil, and the locals are in charge. You can approve one container, but a completely different one gets loaded.