Slashdot Mirror
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."
kim jong un, the son of kim jong il who lately became known as kim jong ded, was recruited by the CIA during his switzerland university years and is acting together with the US to bring down the regime by triggering some sort of crisis.
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
It's the responsible thing to do. This is not a video game or some retarded "never back down" action movie for teenagers. If a change of plans might help avoiding a war (or avoid adding to the fuel), good.
Yes, it would be much better to simply allow things to settle down and let the little tyrant continue the deathcamp conditions prevalent throughout NK.
Either that or we should let him have the first shot. Because that would be the responsible thing to do, right?
(Do we really want him firing off his dirty bombs into SK, Japan, or who knows where else? )
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
If the US wanted a war with North Korea, the pretext would be far more important than the planning and logistics. North Korea would be able to do terrible damage to South Korea regardless of timing, so it'd look a lot better if the US came charging to the rescue against a North Korea that has gone bat shit insane than if the US was building up an invasion force that would be seen as another act of US aggression and backing Kim Jong-Il into a corner where he might as well strike first with all he's got.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You seem to underestimate 60+ years of uninterrupted regime propaganda.
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
You need to look at the cost of not going to war as well.
Would you like to wait, perhaps, until North Korea is testing their Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile equivalents?
NK is a bully child in the playground. Fists can be ignored but when he pulls out a knife you have to do something about him...before he pulls out a gun the next time and starts shooting.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
You have to ask yourself...what is the cost of not going to war against North Korea now.
Do you want to wait to be certain that he has not only nuclear capability and also medium range missile capability but the ability to launch medium range missiles with nuclear warheads (which may not currently be the case) ?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
"Kim..." ::CHOMP!::
"WHAT?"
"Eat your Snickers."
"WHY!?"
"'Cos you turn into a right megalomaniac when you're hungry."
"...Better?"
"Oppa Gangnam Syle!"
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I wouldn't settle for less than both.
Try to placate him... until you can kill him.
You're both forgetting about China, who might have a few things to say about a large scale US military operation on their border...
North Korea has been waving their gun around for a long time. Even though you may not care about this from an American perspective, NK has for decades been fully capable of launching devastating attacks on major South Korean population centers (which don't require intercontinental long range missiles). Outside the perspective of "only American lives matter," NK's longer range weapons don't fundamentally change the diplomatic situation: they are still, as they have always been, capable of going out with an unacceptable suicidal bang, simply continuing the same decades-long tense standoff (in order to continue, on their side, receiving aid money/supplies as appeasement). NK's current round of bluster is really nothing new; and, while there is no certainty in dealing with madmen, there is also no positive reason to expect that NK's actual policies (of waving a gun with their finger on the trigger, but stopping short of anything beyond warning shots) have changed.
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.
Come now, stop and think. What does North Korea have that can not be stopped at will, and don't you realize that those logistics have been worked out pretty consistently? Does North Korea have an Air Force? The answer is "NO", they do not. The few planes they have would be shot down within seconds of taking flight. Nothing they have compares with the US or South Korean planes.
Does North Korea have a Navy? The answer is "NO". They have a few small boats and subs, that like their military planes, would be neutralized within minutes of an engagement.
The few North Korean Soldiers on the border that lived after the first hour of engagement would be just like the Iraqi Army in Gulf 1 and 2. We would have more problems with refugees and surrendering troops than we would the N. Korean Military. ("We" being S. Korea more than the US)
We are not very worried about the few T72 tanks that NK has, so the only thing that may cost a few lives is the initial artillery fire. Air power would eliminate that artillery pretty quickly. Oh, and before you hype the short range rockets remember that those are worse than artillery. They are fire and forget with very poor range, extreme inaccuracy, and often don't even explode on impact.
The biggest rational fears are with the few scud missiles they have, which are inaccurate and slow. We have had Patriot batteries in South Korea from long before we saw them in the Gulf wars. Think about what they have been trying to hype on the News over the last couple days. "N. Korea has moved 1-3 medium range missiles to the east. Really, 1-3 missiles is a concern when they are scud type missiles? That is laughable if you stop and think about it! It would be sad of course if they were to hit someone with one and people died, don't get me wrong. But it is not a big military threat.
I have not quite figured out the game that's being played politically, but the hype of doom and gloom is grossly exaggerated. I have some speculations, but at present they are not very sound. Some considerations are "Why has China not stopped NK from threats?" China has that much power over NK, perhaps they want to be involved? Why has the US propaganda media (Fox/ABC/NBC) been hyping NK as a real military threat like they did the Iraqi Army? We know their capabilities, and have no reason to over play them unless our politicians (or perhaps more appropriately the people pulling their strings) want a war.
And lets not put this into terms like the propaganda machine might. We don't need to invade and capture North Korea to win and neither does South Korea. We take out anything in their military that "may" cause anyone else harm and leave them the fuck alone. Let the great leader sit in the sand box and cry because you took his shovel away for trying to hit other kids with it. If South Korea want's to drive up to the capital and make it official, that's fine but the US does not have too, and should not consider it.
There is no need for a long drawn out Gorilla war, and if we get into one it's our the politicians fault. Our politicians need to be dealt with harshly if that happens.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well.
You make it seem as if this hasn't already happened. We're still in a state of war with them. I'm stationed here on the Korean peninsula and we go through peninsula wide exercises twice a year to simulate a war here. On top of that, we go through tactical training at a unit level even more frequently than that.
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.
fair market value of targets completely irrelevant and useless point of view for the purposes of warfare. Risk and benefit analysis of war doesn't include those numbers.
We probably have a nuclear sub or 2 off the cost. We could empty all tubes on NK and level the country.
Murdering millions of innocent non-combattant peasants, nice. I thought Milosevic was dead. See you at the Hague when you're done, ASSHOLE!
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
Because they didn't kill any South Koreans in the Korean war right?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
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