Has the Korean topic been done to death?

Some fodder for consumption.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/27/north.korea.analysis/index.html

More fodder...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tad-daley/maybe-we-should-take-the_b_207984.html

It's a fait accompli.

The US let the nuke cat out of the bag, the US is the only country to use them, and the US introduced nukes to the Korean peninsula by stationing nukes in South Korea briefly. Yet Americans seem to have the foolish notion that America can dictate who has what weapons because they are the "good guys".

North Korea correctly noted that having nukes themselves would be an additional deterrent and quite frankly the nuclear club needs to stop pretending they can dictate who has nukes by sheer strength of conviction. Countries like North Korea and Iran would be foolish not to develop them given the history of aggression on the part of their enemies who do have nukes.

As long as North Korea walks the non-proliferation line from here on out it will have nukes until an economic incentive removes it because war with North Korea was already not a great idea before the nukes and it would take some serious proliferation to change this.




It doesn't matter if it's a Bush or Obama administration as neither is stupid enough to initiate a war with North Korea over mere possession of nukes. They can do about as much destruction to our allies in Seoul with conventional weapons and the bottom line is that they have a enough of a deterrent to prevent military action against them.

The solution from here for the US is an economic one. North Korea has put out overtures about resurrecting the deal where we were supposed to provide them light-water reactors in exchange for abandoning their nuclear program. Given their history of deceit in such negotiations this becomes more complex but war is not an option and they'd be stupid to give up the nuclear deterrent just for angry words.

The only viable leverage the rest of the world has is economic incentives. Removing the economic siege is what is most likely to change the facts on the ground in the Koreas.

The way I see it happening now is that N. Korea, emboldened by their new tech, sees anyone and anything actually trying to carry through with the enforcement of the sanctions as a target. They are certainly rattling their sabers these days.

What of a N. Korean offensive on the shipping lanes? What do you suspect will result should N. Korea carry through with some of their threats?

Probably . . . but that's never stopped us in the past.

Sabre rattling and unyielding negotiating positions are characteristic of the North Koreans. They've been doing it at Panmunjom for well over 50 years. It is common for the North Koreans to threaten--but i know of no example in which they have attempted to carry through with their threats. However, that's why we have had troops on the DMZ since 1953--to "keep Joe Ching honest."

If they carry out their threats, which as Setanta correctly notes would seem very unlikely given their history of using empty threats to gain economic concessions in negotiation, then we may well have a military conflict with them. But we have pretty good deterrents for that as well and North Korea just hasn't shown a propensity for that kind of self-destruction.

alrighty then. History has shown that they like to hear themselves make threats, let's hope it remains so.

Kim Il Sung was a Stalinist, and had received his principle support from the Soviets before the UN Army pushed so close to the Yalu River, at which time China decided to intervene. His negotiating style was much like Stalin's but also a much more blunt object. While i was stationed in Korea, a North Korean work party severely beat an American MP. (A Swiss officer who was just leaving threw him in his jeep and drove him to our hospital--the man was severely beaten but not permanently injured.) It was part and parcel of their "negotiating style." It was saying, in so many words, "see how tough and uncompromising we are?" No one had any illusions about the nature of the incident--those workers would not have behaved as they did without being prompted to it by authority. The Americans reacted by doubling the guard, and replacing the American MPs with ROK combat MPs. That sent a message to the North Koreans that if they wanted to try that again, they could play with creating an incident which might lead to war, given that ROK combat MPs would respond to such an incident by beating those workers to death. (Combat MPs are arguably the toughest troops in any army. The U.S. Army's 728 Military Police battalion, a combat MP battalion, was wiped out three times during the Korean War because they cover the retreat of higher headquarters, and they won't retreat as long as there is any possibility of that higher headquarters being overrun--they protected UN and Eighth Army headquarters.)

You see this kind of thing with the Persians, too--but they're pikers compared to Joe Ching. Perhaps you will recall that prior to the flap about their nuclear program, they had proposed that petroleum be priced in euros rather than in dollars. That was something which would seriously alarm the energy industry in the United States, and i personally believe that the Bush administration responded to that with brinksmanship, bringing up the Persian nuclear program, and darkly hinting of invasion. An invasion would have been the height of idiocy, but i suspect their brinksmanship was effective to the extent that Iran was not prepared for that response, and that they have been dismayed since then dealing with it. They won't show it, of course, and they talk tough--but they've dropped their effort to get petroleum priced in euros.

The North Koreans overreach themselves constantly, though, with their bellicose position and their threats. It's hard to take them seriously, because sparking a nuclear conflagration would seriously interfere with Kim Jong Il's surfing for internet porn. I suspect that international diplomats know how to deal with this, and it in fact serves to provide leverage to get the Chinese to put more pressure on them.

The losers in all of this are, of course, the people of North Korea. They're still starving, and that isn't likely to change any time soon.

I'm more in favor of letting S. Korea take the lead, but that means following their recommendations and we've never been fully willing to do that. S. Korea has a much larger vested interest in N. Korea from both a military and civilian perspective. We should be listening very carefully to what they want from negotiations.

They do not have nukes all they had in some nuclear devices that barely work exploding with a force of 1/10 our first bombs and it seem unlikely they will improve greatly in the near future.

The problem for them is plutonium bombs are hard to set off correctly and exploded lens instead of a fairly simple gun type trigger is a non-simple engineering feat.

Robert what to bet that the two test devices used a gun type trigger with plutonium and that is why they seem to had fizzle?

Now if they could get enough weapon grade uranium then they would be in business but that is harder then having a reactor cooking plutonium.

So far they are blowing smoke nuclear smoke but still smoke.

You all talk like this is a North Korean threat. But who is threatened? That's American totalitarianism for you, just toe the line and say these gooks need to learn a lesson .

Do you really think that N Korea is going to launch a nuclear strike against the most murderous and heartless nation in the world, yes that's you America. No of course not. But did any of you armchair generals ever think that they might want some defense against the most disgusting threat of all, namely a U.S aircraft carrier group, the thing you guys use to quickly kill plenty of civilians. That's why they launched those rockets across the sea. They aren't going to blow up Japan, they know what will happen to them if they do, and they're a hell of a lot more civilized than you.

North Korea is not even a party to the nuclear non proliferation treaty, so get off your high horse, they have a legal right, , they just aren't bound by it it. Of course America doesn't give a sh*t about laws, only what they can get away with, and how many people they can kill. Shame on you.

So go on and yell and whine about it, why not starve a sovereign nation some more. As long as America gets its way all is good, as long as you live in America.

First they would have a problem moving their devices with a 16 wheeler and the only way to get such a weapon on our shores would be by ship and I had not look up the damage a few kiloton weapon would do in one of our ports but the results would not likely to worth the trouble and we would response.

The only true danger is that Japan will be driven to put together a few hundred real nuclear weapons in a month or so, as they have the technology and the material to do so and in that time frame.

Oh and they would not need 16 wheelers or ships to deliver their real warheads.

The link below is what would happen if the evil/stupid Koreans would get one of their nuclear devices into ones of our ports.

A 1917 type Halifax 3 kiloton blast would be annoying however not the end of the world and this look to be the worst such a "nuclear" power could do to us.

Side note we do check out ships before they reach our harbors or at least that is my understanding

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion