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North Korea Conducts Fifth Nuclear Test -- The Largest One Yet (cnn.com)
TMB writes: As reported by CNN, North Korea has conducted its 5th nuclear test, the largest yet at 10 kilotons.
Before the test was reported, Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot reported: A magnitude 5.3 earthquake has been detected in North Korea, amid reports the country had been preparing for its fifth nuclear test. South Korea's Yonhap news agency said it had been an "artificial quake." The U.S. Geological Survey said the tremor had been detected in the north-east of North Korea, close to a known nuclear test site. The earthquake occurred close to the surface, the USGS said. The shallow depth and precise timing of the quake suggests it was man-made. North Korea says it has tested a nuclear warhead and that the test showed the warhead "has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets."
Can we assume that one day North Korea will attack something? I've always thought that they're just posturing, but this most recent "test" makes me hesitate...
Seems like we are headed inexorably towards a Nash equilibrium where everyone has a nuclear arsenal. Hard to see how that ends well.
The US nuclear missile fleet is still using 8" hard disks.
I'm sure the North Koreans are not.
North Korea says it has tested a nuclear warhead and that the test showed the warhead "has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets."
This can't have happened, Bill Clinton signed an agreement with North Korea.
At the risk of accomplishing nothing more than feeding a troll, I feel compelled to note that you appear to be suffering from a great deal of ignorance regarding the scope of nuclear warfare. -PCP
All they need to do is put it on a missile, then they can wipe out the US
Not yet. NK is still stoppable. This is probably why nobody is doing anything.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
No, we are all South Koreans today. The nuke doesn't care.
Nope, the NKs are probably still using chicken wire and chinese duct tape.
North Korea isn't that technologically adept, their regime certainly doesn't foster the kind of environment where the required talent can exist readily.
Eat shit and die Mecca and Ping Pong Pyongyang!
I think you mean 8" hard dicks.
NorthKoreans are barely 2" in warm bath water.
Sorry... You mean 3.5.
Actually the reason why no one is doing anything is that despite the posturing of the US and friends, North Korea is a rational actor. Same as Iran.
- These characters were randomly selected.
North Korea isn't that technologically adept, their regime certainly doesn't foster the kind of environment where the required talent can exist readily.
That's nonsense, or wishful thinking at best. Obviously there are talented people there too. I'm assuming the 'kind of environment' you refer to is the Western ideal one: creative, free, entrepreneurial etcetera. But people can be pretty creative is the alternative is horrible enough too, and that seems to work quite well there. As you can see, for example, here their computer technology may be somewhat outdated, but well past the 8" hard disk stage - more like beginning of the 21st century. Looks like the US has the 'handicap of a head start' here.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
First, Norks don't have a V2. Second, there is no border. It's a DMZ. Third. Seoul is HUGE. Norks needs 10 puny "10 kiloton" nukes to put a dent in it!
Too bad some USians often confuse Iran, Iraq, Taleban, ISIS and Al-Qaeda into a sweet, Hollywood entertainment mix with the motivational spices of Shia vs. Sunni ignorance and "They gonna get us all" lunacy.
Kim Jong Il keeps thumbing his nose at these flaccid weak limp dicks who keep looking the other way. China is protecting Kim Jong Il. Why?
Pro-tips for China:
1. Do you realize if Kim Jong Il attacks anyone with these nukes all bets are off?
2. Do you realize if he does the USPACFLT will steam into a big and humiliating battle on your doorstep?
3. You think you're a big tough new superpower now but America would kick your ass. You have no idea how the US is at war. Yeah the Taliban give them a hard time but China is the conventional enemy the US could beat to a bloody shitty mess without breaking a conversation?
4. If he does use nukes then China's name will forever be mud.
5. China if you don't want a remilitarized Japan then China's support for Kim Jong Il gives them no choice.
6. And stop trolling South East Asia. You're meant to be making friends but there is no one in South East Asia you haven't pissed off: http://www.scmp.com/comment/in...
No, they have Dear Leader calculate everything in his brilliant head.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Iran != NK. Israel considers Iran as a threat, and many countries worry about the Middle-East conflict. Who really cares about NK? SK and Japan, mainly. Who *really* cares about SK and Japan? Unfortunately...
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Shia? Sunni? You give them too much credit if you ask me.
If you do a poll, my guess is that the result would be that Shia is some comedian, Sunni is what California is, and over there in that Arab desert is one big homogeneous mass of brown skinned towelheads that wanna kill the American way of life.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To see that people from the only nation in the world to actually use nuclear weapons in an attack and that regularly wages proactive genocidal wars, is so critical of others following the path it created.
As an aside, my cousin Tom is still a virgin and still lives with his elderly parents. Does he count?
Yes, there is a muslim terrorist (literally) dying to meet him.
What can anyone do? An invasion would be a disaster, China would get involved... Diplomacy is difficult while the US and SK continue to antagonise with military "exercises" of their cost.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
All they need to do is put it on a missile, then they can wipe out the US, the bully of the world!!
Could Russia have even wiped out the US in the height of it? I don't think so, destroy a lot of places and kill a lot of people, sure, but wipe out? The NK's are going to need to get their production skates on if they want to wipe out anywhere!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
8" disks should be enough for everybody.
If we had any leadership in the White House we would implement a regime change in North Korea. The country is getting more and more unstable and developing weapons that seriously are beyond the scope of controlling. Yes, ISIS is a fundamental challenge as it spreads across nations recruiting lone wolfs which do need to be addressed. But countries like North Korea with unstable leaders need to be silenced as well. I think we have far more concerns today with the rogue countries than eight years ago. We do deals with countries like Cuba but ask nothing in return for our support. What happened to demanding at least a country act civilized to its own people to do business with them? Iran, North Korea, Cuba. Really, we don't seem to be the nation of promoting freedom anymore.
Thanks to 50 years of outsourcing manufacturing jobs the US military is the same sort of paper tiger Nazi Germany was - formidable yes, but completely unable to replace its losses in any prolonged conflict. So spare me the bravado
Okay, he transposed the '2' and the '7'. Happens!
Their 'virginity' seems to be a permanently recycled process - they service one martyr, then their virginity returns as the next one comes in. It's not like there is the martyr population * 72. It's like zipping open your pants on & off every time you take a leak. I like Debbie Schlussel's description of them as the '72 Helen Thomas'.
Nukes are so 20th century. Precision weapons are much more useful. Somebody should send O'l Kimmy the memo - obviously he never got it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
They need to just hurry up and fire something at us. The day after that, the North Korea problem will essentially be solved.
Well, we have someone running for office who knows all about destabilizing foreign nations and making it look like an uprising from the inside. I wonder why the powers that be haven't pulled out the CIA book of dirty tricks out on the North Koreans yet. Maybe they serve a better purpose...
Mainly because it ignores that the only reason North Korea exists is that a local, unpopular Communist sympathizer named Kim Il-Sung was set up as a puppet ruler in the North in the wake of Stalin's invasion of Northern China. Stalin had negotiated a withdrawal from Manchuria with Chiang prior to the August 1945 invasion. No such agreement applied to Korea, and Stalin chose to keep it as a buffer state under a compliant puppet ruler.
Self-determination for Koreans was non-existent in the North. Complain and die.
You sound like a Communist yourself.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Plenty of six foot pricks in the usa - you call them Americans.
I knew Kim Jong-un was a fan but this celebratory firework is really out of proportion... or is it?
You're right, people in that part of the world are all so unforgivably stupid for thinking that people in some other part of the world are all so unforgivably stupid. It's certainly not you who is unforgivably stupid.
Clinton is a square shooter. Clinton 2016!
Maybe he really does think he's invincible or can rule the world.
The shallow depth and precise timing of the quake...
the warhead "has been standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets."
They have rockets that travel underground? Are they planning to nuke a subway?
So instead of a firecracker, this one was the size of a cherry bomb?
With North Korea's nascent industrial capacity, I'm oddly of the opinion that he should test until he's out of bombs and should test missiles until he runs out of missiles.
Fire the gun into the ground until the clips empty...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Russia could definitely have "wiped out" the US. Maybe not killed every last person, but every major city and suburb could have been eliminated easily. With all the fallout it is likely that most people not immediately killed would have severe health problems.
Some farmers and mountain men may have survived but "the USA" could have been completely and totally wiped out.
Lets seem then hack into 8 inch floppies, Anything newer is going to be easier to hack. The old tech works well, no reason to upgrade and connect to the internet of hacking.
If North Korea launches a 10kt bomb on any of our allies in the region it'll be fun to watch Pongyang get turned into a glowing parking lot in the matter of minutes it'll take to launch a missile from a U.S. boomer.
Those were 8" floppies, not hard disks. Get your shit straight, this is a technical site.
No denying that the South was very nasty from the 1950s through the early 1982s, from Rhee to Park to Chun. Purges, massacres, and even a nuclear weapons program. However, trying to draw too many parallels doesn't work either because the patron states behind both regimes had very different approaches. Given Rhee's unsavoriness, fear of a Southern led invasion triggering global war, and the broader political instability in the late 1940s, the United States never really bothered to equip the ROK with the heavy weapons needed to wage an offensive campaign. At the start of the Korean War, their forces were pretty much a glorified gendarmerie, and the United States held the leash tightly to prevent a war. The Soviets on the other hand, had no restraints and fully equipped the North Koreans with the latest heavy weapons and green lighted an invasion.
Even as you go through the Cold War, the United States played a very careful balancing act, trying to prop up the South while actively constraining them from launching a reunification campaign (that could spiral into WWIII) and actively squashed any efforts by the South to become a nuclear state. The North has always been much more openly aggressive, maintaining a forward positioned posture and threatening invasion at every turn.
There's also still no overlooking that the South has evolved into a relatively liberal, democratic society that is a responsible global player. Whereas the North is still very much an old school totalitarian dictatorship which continues to flout international norms.
Is there somewhere we can ship them all?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Given that no one seems to bat an eye, I assume that the general opinion from Russia, China, Japan, and the US (at minimum) is that NK meets this level of stability in some fashion.
Not necessarily.
IMHO, it's not so much that nobody bats an eye, it's that nobody wants to take on the expense/mess/loss of life/headaches that regime change in NK would entail. Think about the logistics involved. NK's infrastructure is notoriously weak to begin with. They just had a famine a decade or so ago that killed millions. In the best of times they have a hard time feeding themselves. The whole country is held together by duct tape as it is. It would take any militarily capable western country a week or two to dismantle, tops. It wouldn't have to be the USA that does it - I'd bet France could do it over a long weekend without breaking a sweat.
So, you add to that the entire population is brainwashed to think that the supreme command of NK are essentially living divinities, and the rest of the outside world are bloodthirsty savages out to get them. Humanitarian efforts to help the citizens post-regime change would be rejected. They would think the aid workers were there to kill everyone, since that's what they've all been told since birth. It would be similar to the mass suicides on Okinawa. But worse, because it would be an entire country instead of a single island. Millions of civilians would die.
It would be a humanitarian disaster of a scale not seen since WWII, and nobody wants that mess on their hands.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
All they need to do is put it on a missile, then they can wipe out the US, the bully of the world!!
Right, all it takes is a 10 kiloton warhead to wipe out the US. A 10 kiloton warhead wouldn't even wipe out Hawaii, which is the only place they can attack with their 1 submarine capable of carrying 1 missile (maybe - assuming the submarine travels its maximum range, and the missile also travels its maximum range - then they might be able to hit Hawaii). Or I guess they do have that big ICBM, so I guess they can use that to attack Alaska. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't get shot down in flight. And assuming that the ICBM actually works in the first place and isn't going to explode on launch. Maybe in another decade or so they'll be able to attack California. And maybe only a few decades after that they'll be able to lob something all the way to the US east coast. And naturally US military technology won't progress at all in that time, so they'll totally be able to attack us without getting their century old technology shot down.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Pro-tips for China: ...
3. You think you're a big tough new superpower now but America would kick your ass. You have no idea how the US is at war.
You do realize that the Korean war was a proxy fight between the US and China, right?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Our Ohio class boomer fleet uses Magneto Optical Disks for targeting, but that was some time ago.. They may have upgraded since. N Korea goal is to detonate an EMP burst over the USA from orbit. The USA will retaliate against N Korea city''s & military and EMP their supporters China+Russia in kind, leaving neither side with a real advantage.
Bill Clinton promised he had ended "the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula" with his deal. He had social worker and Democrat activist Wendy Sherman lead the negotiations. President Obama used the same woman to negotiate a similar "deal" with Iran. Note: here resume LOOKS good now at first glance because she was involved in this stuff, but she had no credentials for any of this before Bill used her for it.
Compare the Clinton statement re North Korea with Barack Obama's statement re his Iran deal and you will see that we should have ZERO confidence the same team of idiots got better results from Iran. Iran will be detonating bombs within a decade, and MAY have been involved in this Korean detonation (Iran and N.K. have been caught cooperating in the past).
Prepare for a nuclear war, possibly within the next 10 to 20 years, thanks to the social workers and community organizers of the DNC.
Oh, and Democrats have a "talking point" for the stupid to use on this: "Bush screwed it up!". They cannot however back this up with any actual action by Bush that breached the Clinton "deal", nor can they point to ANY action Obama has take in the past 7.5 years to repair it.
Hope you all like yer gay this, and gay that, and unlimited immigration, and global warming fixes, 'cause the price tag is going to be VERY steep. It's a bad idea to vote for foolish globalist morons (in EITHER party) in order to get the "right" to publicly celebrate activities you could have always done privately, or to "save the planet" from a degreee of temperature in a century, or prove that you are not a racist - - - particularly when it means you might not be alive to participate in those activities, might be accellerating a much more severe global threat, and the immigrants you invited in are no more bomb-proof than you are.
One of those Danish cartoons which had Muzzies all up in arms was one that depicted an agent telling a group of martyrs 'Stop, stop, we're out of virgins!!!'
Yet, they have no qualms about converting and claiming more than a billion people who neither know, nor speak any Arabic (let alone the medieval Arabic in which the Quran was written). People of the East Indies, the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia (including Iran), Turkey and the Caucuses do not know or speak Arabic, even if some languages may have freely borrowed & lent words
1. The UN fails at EVERYTHING. It was designed to be run by the "good" countries that saved the world in WWII, but one of them was an ally of necessity who had the opposite agenda (the Soviet Union) and who blocked everything good. Then the other coutries went all wobbly and kicked the "good" Chinese (Taiwan) off the security council and gave the seat to the evil communist Chinese of the mainland, making a security council that always has at least one evil member on any given proposal. Then seats were showered on to Muslim nations who use all their votes to wage a political jihad against the state of Israel, often fooling gullible moron countries to join their idiotic actions. The UN is incapable of doing anything positive. It SHOULD have been a more practical organization of democratic countries with similar economies and ethics, who COULD act together.
2. China has no intention of stopping North Korea. North Korea is their puppet. They benefit in many ways from what the NorKs do. They get international political clout as morons come to them to talk about restraining North Korea. They get international sympathy (as in: "of COURSE they're paranoid, they have North Korea on their border!"). They get geopolitical leverage: They supply and train North Korea, who then make noise, and then they can offer to help restrain their puppet....
3. The US has had no intention of stopping North Korea, because the globalist do not want North Korea stopped. Bill Clinton's SecState, Madeleine Albright, infamously said she did not trust America and wanted a new nuclear-armed opponent after the cold war to restrain the US. George W Bush listed North Korea in his famous new axis of evil speech, but then fixated on Iraq and did NOTHING about North Korea. Barack Obama has not only done NOTHING about North Korea, but has funneled BILLIONS of dollars to Iran, while Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and is engaged in cooperative nuclear research with the North Koreans.
Too bad some arrogant douches often confuse USians into a sweet, self-righteous-smarter-than-thou-virtue-signalling mix of redneck obesity with the motivational spices of religion, aggression, and ignorance.
Fuck off. If you're so much better than us then get the fuck off the internet that we invented.
Fuck you North Korea. You aren't going to use that on anyone. Not ever. Triple dog dare you.
Fuck off. If you're so much better than us then get the fuck off the internet that we invented.
All it takes is a K-8 to K-12 education which contains some comparative religious studies. A healthy, short term option would be to get the fuck off watching Hollywood/Network bullshit as long as they keep miss educating the public and reduce listening the certain^h all radio talk shows. Then again, who masters the canned story telling recipes like Hollywood and keep us all entertained across the world? (sniff)