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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...
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.
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...
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.
Well, the US military plays for keeps, and while NK is figuring out how to build / launch nukes, the US Navy is testing out its shiny new rail gun...
And that's just the stuff the military feels like showing off. We probably have some bombs, in Area 51, that do "things" that most PhD-level Physicists / Chemists would have trouble grasping, let alone the military guards laughing about a small plane dropping a single bomb like that would do any damage...
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
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.
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.
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
Back then japan was made of paper . concrete structures survived well. Infact after 2 blocks the pressure wave is on par to a hurricane tho a little warmer
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
If we had any leadership in the White House we would implement a regime change in North Korea.
Exactly who is itching for a fight here? It's not that the NK leadership is exactly peace-loving, but can we blame them for being somewhat suspicious about the US' intentions if this is an accepted way of thinking about foreign policy there?
But countries like North Korea with unstable leaders need to be silenced as well.
'Unstable leaders' ... and this is coming from a country where Donald J. Trump could be chosen as the next president?
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
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!
Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Il is his late father, that champion golfer who once hit 9 holes-in-one
Please review more information on the physical effects of Little Boy, and consider the key metrics as they would apply to present day Seoul. I trust your perspective will have changed after a bit of further contemplation. -PCP
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.
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.
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.
It is terrifying to think that there are people who have no conception of the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
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.
The critique is on the warlike culture in the US, not on the past slavery. Slavery is outdated anyway, modern capitalists concluded long ago that it is much cheaper to pay their workers a little and let them care for themselves and let them compete with each other. Slaves are expensive property that has to be kept alive and fed and healthy to be productive. Free-market workers are easily replaced.
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.
It is terrifying to think that there are people who have no conception of the destructive power of nuclear weapons.
Amen. And the idea that if they send one out to punish some entity that they will be around to appreciate it for more than a day, if that. WTF?
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
concrete structures survived well.
Before, after.
"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.
...well...yes, its called an election in the free world. Any nutjob can run....it doesn't mean they get elected. I distinctly remember some guy locked up in jail trying to run for decades. For better or worse you get what the majority vote in and the "people" are responsible for that.
That's part of the beauty of the election process, and it sure beats being stuck with the same ass nugget for life, Amiright Comrade?
By the way, what happens if he losses, are we back to Bush being the strawman?
Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Il is his late father, that champion golfer who once hit 9 holes-in-one
Does "un" indicate that he is incapable of the same? Wait.. base language barrier. "My bad". /humor
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.
...'Unstable leaders' ... and this is coming from a country where Donald J. Trump could be chosen as the next president?
I feel you limited your logic "is a bit unstable" when you limited "unstable leaders" to only Donald J. Trump. The only other possibility is just as, if not more unstable. Speaking of instability, I heard a nuclear reaction was triggered in NK. *drum roll* /humor
I'll be here all week.
They need to just hurry up and fire something at us. The day after that, the North Korea problem will essentially be solved.
..but but..what about all of the innocent people?
Sorry, sorry, but I have to...
"Pizza..The..HUT!!!"
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
Well, his father fell IL and died. So the Norks are UN der
Kim Jong Il is dead. His son, Kim Jong Un, is the current leader of NK.