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Korea Tensions Lead To Delay Of Minuteman III Test Flight
An anonymous reader writes "The U.S. plans on delaying 'the test of the Minuteman III intercontinental missile' that was scheduled for launching next week out of the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The reported reason is to prevent 'misperception or miscalculation' by North Korea. North Korea has warned foreign diplomats that 'they could not guarantee their safety from next Wednesday' onwards, but the warning has not caused any plans for evacuation of any embassies so far."
You're both forgetting about China, who might have a few things to say about a large scale US military operation on their border...
You seem to underestimate 60+ years of uninterrupted regime propaganda.
+5 Insightful?
Let me tell you as someone living in Korea that there is zero question here about whether or not North Korea wants to blow Seoul. I'll give you a hint -- they wouldn't drop bombs on Seoul even if the US was nuking Pyongyang.
While the North has been a separate country for a long time at this point, the people on the two sides of the DMZ do not at all consider each other enemies. The rhetoric from the North about destroying the South is firmly directed at the South Korean government.
People have a racial unity here that you can probably not even imagine. Here's an attempt at an analogy. Would the Israelis bomb a city of 100% Jews?
The North considers the people in the South to be essentially captive by a traitorous government that's being dictated behind the scenes by the US and other foreign influences. They want to 'liberate' their relatives and their people, not bomb them into dust because they don't like what they consider to be a minority of them who are oppressing the rest.
I know the story about the artillery within range of Seoul makes a good scare piece, but there's zero chance they will be wantonly killing all the South Koreans just because it's technically a separate country.
Long live the BSD license
The humanitarian side of it would be difficult regardless of when the war started. China might have to invade from the north and set up refugee camps inside North Korea to prevent millions of refugees from spilling over the border. Now you have to take care to not bomb the Chinese soldiers inside North Korea.
Not too many people outside China seem to get this.
The Chinese would probably be just as glad as not to see Kim and his posse jet off to Tenerife or someplace and leave the place to the South (see DDR, dissolution of). The Chinese would no longer have to be bothered with propping up a régime that has become an embarrassment if not outright liability to them; they wouldn't have to deal with (yes, potentially millions of) North Korean refugees (if anything, they'd probably like to move back about 10 million ethnic Koreans who already live on the Chinese side); and the South would be kept occupied for the next 20 years or so rehabilitating the North, they don't have any islands we think ought to be ours--so sure, let the US continue to be their good friend. Whatever.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Some things work to the point where if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The orignal designs are near-optimal for the intended role, and what few updates there are tend to be minor improvements. For instance the B-52s are another weapons platform that has been kept going for years longer than expected, and the A-10 may also end up extended as there's no good replacement able to do its job.
As for the missiles, solid fuel missiles don't have much in the way of moving parts. The missiles should be reliable provided they keep well in storage and minor maintenance done to keep batteries up and lubricants from drying out is adequate. Other parts shouldn't be too hard to update either, if the rest of the hardware is known, it should be fairly straight forward to design a "plug-n-play" guidance system update with any revisions in later maintenance packages. Basically scheduled test launches like this aren't really much as tests (we know the missiles typically work as intended), but more of a quality control measure in regards to inventory.
What gives you the impression that North Korea doesn't want to kill South Koreans? Hell, the North tortures it's own citizens. What makes you think they'll even second guess bombing the shit out of Seoul? The citizens of North Korea probably have no animosity towards the South, but they're not the ones dropping bombs. And I don't know which South Koreans you're talking to, but I know plenty that would love for us to go and destroy the North.
Btw, Living in South Korea doesn't mean anything. I live in South Korea too and I'd beg to differ with your position.
North Korea isn't eastern Europe.
No one in Eastern Europe really liked communism or Russian rule.
They were puppet states with little if any popular backing.
Regimes like Cuba, Vietnam, and NK, are regimes that did have, at least at one point popular backing, and were founded by charismatic leaders viewed as heros, because the people knew FAR worse than the regimes that got set up there.
Cuba - if you read history you knew cuba was never a democracy, Batistas regime was far worse than Castros. The revolution that Castro fought wasn't even communist until a few years after the revolution, after the US denounced it, and they needed political backing.
Vietnam - was lead by Ho Chi Min. He was fighting a gureilla war against the French before WW2, the Japanese durring WW2, and the French again after WW2. He was a US ally in ww2 against the Japaneese. He expected the US to help vietnam get indepedence after the war, they didn't, so he went to Russia and turned against the US. Still the constitution of Vietnam has very similar pre-amble and rhetoric to our own. The regime in the south was held together by nothing but the US Government, and fell apart when we abandonded it in 1973.
North Korea - Kim Il-Sung, the founder, like Ho Chi Min, was another anti-Japaneese insurgent in WW2, and extremely popular for fending of the Japaneese in WW2, this cemented his popularity. NK is isolated from the outside so no one in NK has any idea of the rest of the world beyond what they are told. They just know who saved them from the Japaneese in WW2. Visitors are carefully screened and chaparoned.
NK is also NOT a sattelite state of any other regime at current, as hard as it is to believe. They remained hardline stallinist durring China's "cultural revolution", and breshnev's liberalism, and later the fall of the USSR. Their policy of self-reliance and isolation has fended off Russian and Chineese reform policies at whrecking their once vibrant economy.
They have this massive army, and experts disagree with what state of repair their ancient military vehicles are in.
Which is entirely irrelivant because they do not have the fuel to power even a 1/3rd of their force for a signifigant amount of time, nor does any of it stack up to the latest NATO equivilants.
Further adding to the mix, is the rugged mountains of NK, making tank warfare almost worthless, along with most other armored vehicles. A battle with NK would be determined with infantry. NK's 120,000 strong special forces/light infantry corps being the only formation we really have to worry about, and their vast networks of tunnels.
These requires really little if any infastructure support, as they will steal provisions and equipment from the enemy, and try and infiltrate deep inside enemy lines.
Its also unlikely that if NK tries and nuke someone, it will not be done with missiles. It would be carried by these special forces by hand, and detonated in place.
Also, read more H. John Poole. He'll explain most of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._John_Poole