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Are Some of North Korea's Long-Range Missiles Fakes?
gbrumfiel writes "North Korea has not been shy in announcing plans to destroy the United States, but questions remain over whether it has the nukes or the missiles to do so. Now NPR reports on open-source intelligence showing that one of the North's most 'advanced' weapons might actually be a decoy. Six KN-08 missiles were paraded last year, but each showed differences in the way they were assembled. Is it all a bluff? Or are the missiles part of a real program?"
Obviously the ones they parade are just shells. Do you think the US/USSR paraded armed nuclear missiles down the streets back in the day?
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I just read those two lines under that nice picture.
Some analysts say the half-dozen missiles showcased at the military parade were fakes.
So the ones they showed in a parade are fakes. Now how smart do you have to be to decide to use fakes in a parade? I mean, you have maybe only two of them working, maybe only one, or maybe even six in good condition. Why take the risk that something happens while showing them off? Showing them in a parade means they are not ready to use if the US or the South attacks. (How unlikely this might be to us, they have a different perspective.) The decoys might be empty ones that will be used later. That each of them has differences only shows that they are working on them.
It only takes ONE to start a major war.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Say what you will about North Korea, you still have to admit those guys sure know how to put on a parade.
Close inspection of the nose of the missile shows the warhead's surface is undulated. Some analysts suggest the wrinkles mean the material is a thin metal sheet, unable to withstand flight pressures.
Maybe they're speed ridges, you know, to make them go faster. Sort of like speed holes on a sports car, but different...
No, in case I fooled you, I'm not a rocket scientist.
Problem solved!
So just to be clear. Them threatening to nuke us, bad. Us nuking them just to be sure, good. OK?
But bullies usually at least look intimidating. This is more like the underweight nerdy kid in the slow reading group playing with his Power Rangers action figures saying that someday, the Power Rangers will beat up the jock. The nerdy kid might be able to give the jock a black eye if he throws the action figure, but then the jock will beat the living shit out of him. And break the nerdy kid's toys.
Seriously folks... they HAVE nukes. We know this. They've detonated them underground, we've detected the flash. It's fact. (unless both they and our own government is lieing to us... a distinct possibility)
Do they have missiles that can launch them? Who gives a shit? Any ballistic missile they would have would be trivial for our military to shoot down. They do, however, have very sophisticated submarines. All they need to do is load one of their nukes on a sub and sail it into a major harbor anywhere in the world and viola, world catastrophe. This is the threat we should be worried about. The whole missile thing is just sabre rattling, irrelevant of their real capabilities. They'd need thousands to overwhelm our defenses.
You need to read up. SH made up his fake WMDs as deliberate policy. He actually essentially confirmed this later. He made them pretty convincing. Pretty much all intelligence worldwide was fooled. Yes, the response was just as crazy as the provocation. I thought I made all this clear.
now we have north korea. from TFA:
North Korea has demonstrated its ability to build short- and medium-range missiles, and it has launched a small satellite into space. But neither of these achievements would necessarily allow it to reach the U.S. with a warhead.
so how many more steps will have to be completed before we land a competent assessment that north korea can send a warhead to the US? are we seriously going to entertain the idea that a country capable of launching a satellite into space is just 'faking it' when it comes to missile technology? Parent posts are probably correct: you're absolutely insane to parade real missiles in a public square if the goal of those missiles is to be highly mobile and undetectable in the face of a nation thats demonstrated numerous times its willingness to violate foreign sovreignity in the pursuit of furthering its interests.
Good people go to bed earlier.
From orbit, I presume?
That would be the only way to be sure...
Saddam Hussein thought he had chemical weapons, and definitely wanted them.
There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein actually thought he had chemical weapons. And since he was kept drugged up the whole time he was on trial, nobody ever got any conclusive answers to anything. He managed to get some good zingers in during the trial anyway.
George Bush said he had chemical weapons.
So, two of the least credible people on the planet said that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, and that's supposed to be convincing?
If I run outside my house, stark naked, on a city street, carrying a fake gun, screaming "I have a gun!!!" The police will probably shoot me.
Probably. But if you run outside your house stark naked with no gun in sight (and clearly, nowhere to conceal one) screaming "I have a gun" they'll probably just taser you.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Be carefuly with that analogy. There's no question that Hussein actually had chemical weapons until the '90s. We sold him the fucking things, and the capability to make more, before the Gulf War, and the UN implemented a disarmament treaty in the aftermath. Whether he was following that threaty - and what risk any remaining weapons might present - was central to the Iraq war. It's not like, apropos of nothing, Western powers decided he must have weapons of mass destruction.
Of course there's a preponderance of evidence that whatever his ambitions, he simply did not have the weapons or the capability to make them. That is, there was evidence of absence, not absence of evidence.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I had to ask myself: Why Sharks? Why not honey badgers? It didn't take long to figure out though that, unlike the sharks, honey badgers wouldn't wait for your call. They don't give a shit, they'd just launch the missiles to see what happens next.
You argument would speak against any punishment, with the death penalty just being the most final case. After all, if I'm innocent, I'm not exactly going to be happy to have been imprisoned for 20 years.
And by your logic on an execution being as bad as e.g. murder, do you think that people who illegally imprison others shouldn't be subjected to jail terms, or fraudsters should never be fined?
Yes, regime change in Iraq was so easy, we should do it all over the world! All it takes is a snap of the fingers...
Wait, wait, who's the psychopath here?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Ok, let's look at this more closely, because you bring up very good and valid points. While it's true, if you are wrongly incarcerated you won't be happy about it, however, there are things which can be done to repay you for that injustice (financial compensation, and I know it may never be enough to make up for you losing your freedom). What reparations can you make to a man who you executed? He's dead, his body will no longer function, ever, you can't give him anything to make him come back to life or to make up for killing him. I won't say that execution is just as bad as murder, because I don't think it is (though I do think it somewhat barbaric).
I got nuthin
Actually his dead grandfather is the eternal president still, they keep the country together by cult worship of him, "cleanest race" and blood purity propaganda, and the worst death camps on earth for the last 50 years such as Camp 14, where children are born as slaves for life under "three generations of punishment" .
Its unfortunate that these Nuclear and Chemical weapons headlines obscure the human rights violations. Currently there is a UN commission investigating NK for crimes against humanity. After reading "Escape from Camp 14" I was completely appalled that these death camps exist even today, and according to satellite images are expanding.
What I want to know is why they have the terrible camoflauge paint job. Wouldn't they look better and more awsome if they were all high-techy coloured and stuff?
When they move these things around the Americans watch them every step of the way, they can't hide them with cammo paint, its not like they are wheeling these things through the jungle or anything either, at any great speed. You can't hide these things, seriously, and so you are parading them around, make them flashy, give them some style! Paint the image of a few great Kims on the side, make them something that really pops, stands out...
don't these dictators know how to do propoganda anymore?
On the other side, you have some 600,000 shitty South Korean soldiers who would probably drop their guns and run
The South Korean soldiers I've known would absolutely not do this. They are tough. They would not win against the North alone, but they absolutely would sacrifice themselves to hold off until the US arrives from the south (where the US military bases are).
Also, your idea of military strategy is wrong. 1.1million infantry cannot do anything without support, they will be mowed down like grass. Look at the battle of Somme for an example of what happens when you try to cross a No-Man's-Land with overwhelming numbers of infantry.
North Korea has the capability to inflict millions of civilian casualties on South Korea, on the first day of battle due to the poor strategic location of Seoul, but they won't win a conventional war.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How about neutrino fluxes? ...How about "the flash" (other than neutrinos), like long-wave EMP radiation...
The problem is that none of these things were detected!
Wikipedia: 2009 detonation - Lack of radionuclide confirmation
or this one: ...as of two days after the blast, Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean investigators had failed to detect any radiation...
Wikipedia: 2013 detonation -
All evidence we have shows that it *was not* nuclear.
You're thinking in the context of mass attacks. That isn't going to happen.
The NK DMZ is 2.5 miles wide. It has no easy passage for vehicles and directly passing through the forest would be all but impossible. Reaching the other side, on foot - if you avoid being eaten or otherwise killed by wildlife or AP mines - would instantly result in being turned into hamburger and/or fine mist by a mix of automated turrets, mortars, etc. Any massing of troops in the forest, as detected by airborne infrared sensors, would immediately result in shelling of the area.
So really, a land passage isn't exactly tenable. There are small passages through these jungles and those are likewise guarded. They'd get shelled out within seconds of any indication of a convoy rolling down the road. (I don't care if they are well trained soldiers, they've got to either walk or ride vehicles, and it takes a long time to move even a fraction of a million people, well trained or not.)
So really, the only tenable way for NK to get actual troops and their associated Chinese vehicles to SK is by sea or air. How well do you think that will work?
Here's a hint: NK uses 1950s-1970s Soviet technology for pretty much everything they do that's "advanced". That means most of what they do is one-off and poorly assembled; they are easily 70 years behind the West at this point in basic industrialization, and they're even further behind if you consider what they are able to produce domestically. NK would almost instantly fall apart internally if they expended the time, energy, and resources to engage in a war - in the matter of days, people would be dying of starvation in high numbers. Posturing alone is likely too much for them to sustain for long.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
All the history books / classes trumpet the whole "US Defender of Freedom" thing regarding WW2, because we helped stop the holocaust. Yet we have the same sorts of concentration camps / ghettos as in WW2, in North Korea right now. You dont think thats something worth considering war for?
Stopping the Holocaust was not really the reason the US entered the war. The public reason was that we were attacked by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. The real reasons are up for debate. But this is a good object lesson in the use of history classes to reinforce the idea that America = Awesome. Unfortunately history is as often about making one's country look good as relating what really happened way back when.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Google "Quaker gun". According to Wiki that phrase dates to the American Revolution; but I bet It's the oldest trick in the book. I bet we can find storis of the ancients doing fakes. There was an entire fake army division prior to D-day in WW2, along with the real ones. My favorite WW2 fake was the bomber with a tail gun that had a double-length barrel with an unusual looking flame arrestor on it. It was either an ordinary gun or a broken tail gun. The Germans didn't want to mess with it though, because it was pretty bad looking.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have a feeling that N.Korean soldiers would be more likely to drop their weapons and look for menial jobs around Seoul that pay 20x better than soldiering for the Kims.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
On the other side, you have some 600,000 shitty South Korean soldiers who would probably drop their guns and run at the first sign of attack...
Oh, I didn't see this "comment". You are DEAD WRONG. 1) They aren't shitty. 2) They are all fully cognizant of the fact that they are there to defend their country. I've met a few of these men (spent time in Asia, including S. Korea), do not confuse S. Korea with the S. Vietnam of the 60's. Seoul is not the Saigon of the Vietnam era, rife with graft & corruption, and petty dictators propped up by a paranoid Lyndon Johnson. S. Korea is a modern society with a petty but dangerous neighbor to the north, and is fully prepared to defend itself. They have to, the have no where else to go. Your opinion is petty and uneducated bias.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
I had a girlfriend like that once.
There's a good chance that the missiles shown in a parade were fakes. Many early missile designs didn't travel well. The US Atlas ICBM had walls so thin it had to be pressurized to keep it from collapsing. When not pressurized, it had to be held in a fixture that kept it under tension. North Korea's missiles are roughly at the Atlas level of technology - they're liquid fueled. Putting them on off-road trucks is not too useful, since they have to be accompanied by liquid oxygen trucks. They need a launch complex.
The Atlas was a good booster. Variants of the design were used into the 1990s. (There's a current "Atlas" booster, but it's a full redesign.) North Korea clearly has boosters in that league - they've launched several. They're just not well suited to parade displays. So it's quite likely that, for parade purposes, dummies were used.
I was born, raised, and educated in the USA, and I never heard this "U.S. Defender of Freedom" thing. We stayed out of WWII because large portions of the US wanted to avoid a repeat of WWI, just as the Oxford Student Debating Society solemnly resolved that there was no reason whatsoever to die for King Or Country just a year or two before Churchill and Co. shamed poor Chamberlain into demanding that Germany not invade Poland or suffer Britain's (and France's) wrath. After Japan attacked, we might have known that Germany needed to be included in the war but Germany was nice enough to declare war on us, before we had to try to convince Congress to declare war on a previously non-belligerent power just because we didn't like them.
We did not declare war on the Vichy regime because we thought that nominal neutrality might work better (and we decided to treat them as if they were the Ghetto Councils that the Nazis set up before they liquidated the Ghettos, ie in charge like Holly Genarro in Die Hard). We "knew" about the death camps, but no one believed the reports because they were made by commy-symps and Jews, and the idea of killing your best and smartest workers was too absurd, just as the Red Cross was notified of the Katryn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets, but they didn't believe it because the Germans reported it.
Face it, pre-emptive war, even against a righteous target, has lost a bit of its luster in the last decade. If the USA *did* decide to do something about NK, large portions of the world, including Europe, would complain about US Cowboy Diplomacy and Warmongering.
BTW, would Poland have objected so much if the Germans asked them to join in a crusade against the Godless Communists on their Eastern border, instead of what happened?
The big difference between North Korea and Nazi Germany is that North Korea's problems and human rights violations are all internal (aside from a few bombings and assassination attempts). Germany made their behavior an international matter by invading neighboring countries.
There's an unstated rule that what happens in your country is your business. Other members of the international community may complain about what you do inside your own borders, but they'll almost never take action based on it. Most of the international community supported the first Gulf War because Iraq invaded Kuwait. Most did not support the second Gulf War because it was a drastic intervention on the internal affairs of Iraq, even if S. Hussein was a psychopathic dictator who occasionally gassed his own citizens. The U.S. tried to paint it as an international matter by saying the threat of using WMDs on other countries was there. But without solid evidence to back it up, people weren't buying it.
I think most people see the right to self-governance as sacrosanct, even if it's clearly being abused by those in power. Because once you cross that line and say it's ok to invade another country for reasons that are internal to that country, you lose the moral high ground if someone invades your country. All the invader have to do is cite some sorts of problems or human rights violations within your country to justify their invasion, and they're treating you by your own standards.
If North Korea invades South Korea or attacks Japan, the U.S. will be there in a heartbeat to drive them back (and probably then some). But as long as North Korea's abuses remain internal, it's going to take a lot before the U.S. (or the international community for that matter) decides to intervene.
I was just reading an article the other day about people in states where there is no compensation, where the conviction still shows up on your record, and where employment for those wrongfully convicted is almost impossible as a result.
These people don't want $50k/yr for lost time - they want their records cleared. Heaven forbid that somebody proven innocent by DNA evidence have a clean record!
$50k/yr is the least we should be doing for them - it should probably be closer to $150k/yr. It isn't like we should be locking up that many people wrongfully that we can't afford it - if we are then the reparations are the least of our problems.
At least 4 invasion tunnels.....that the powers that be admit to, have been found and it is widely thought they have some x number of tunnels that haven't been detected. The tunnels in question were large enough to accomodate armor and mobile artillery.
They could plausibly dump at least a division well behind the DMZ if they've managed to keep even two or three tunnels undetected and usable. This too can be countered by additional defensive rings further back from the DMZ but still it would add to the North's ability to make one hell of a mess before they get their teeth kicked in.
Though come to think of it, I wouldn't put it past us and the SK's to keep quiet about a few tunnels quiet then mining the holy bejezus out of them with some big dialed in arty to boot.