http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/5408246.stm

"I am not prepared at this point to say what we are going to do but I am prepared to say we are not going to wait for a nuclear North Korea, we are not going to accept it," he said.
He said North Korea had reached "a very important fork in the road - it can have a future or it can have these [nuclear] weapons but it cannot have them both".

- I like the strong words. But this is getting scarah.

Well considering North Korea's last couple missile tests, I say let them test their nuke and it will most likely blow up over their most populated areas taking care of the problem all together. I mean all their tests been so successful anyways!

Or it could over-shoot the target and land in the middle of Tokyo.

Just in case you were wondering.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OoFowpSN8U

Looks like the guy has quite the body guard force.

Size of defensive forces around him wouldnt matter if a trained assasine went after him. the problem being that are a number of executive orders from as far back as Carter that say the US government will not assassinate a head of state.

Rev

Just spread the word that he was behind the Danish cartoons, and is a supporter of Rushdi.

Read an editorial (i think ) awhile back that made some pretty good points about potential strategies to handle the NK situation.
step one: Immediately pull ALL US forces out of South Korea.
step two :begin a vigorous build up of the JDF into an offensive capable fighting force
step 3 : watch the Chinese crap their pants because now a regional conflict will no longer involve US forces(at the outset) and a high tech , well equiped japanese army is something the chinese have disliked for longer than the west has had civilization.
step four :watch the Chinese smack Kim Il Jong upside the head and make the little twattard behave.
I thought it made alot of sense.
Classic Risk move, lose the indefensible little out post in the middle of nowhere and throw your assets into a high defensive probabilty island that will deny your opponent the control of a continent.

Size of defensive forces around him wouldnt matter if a trained assasine went after
Does a Tomahawk count as a trained Assassin? cause i'm willing to bet a six pack of double chocalate stout we've had at least 2 Tridents sitting not far off the coast of N. Korea for the last year or more.

mmm chocolate stout

It'll be a subterranean test, most likely, not something likely to "hit Tokyo."

Nice that the "coalition of the willing" was busy in Iraq instead of NK ...

'step 3 : watch the Chinese crap their pants because now a regional conflict will no longer involve US forces(at the outset) and a high tech , well equiped japanese army is something the chinese have disliked for longer than the west has had civilization.
step four :watch the Chinese smack Kim Il Jong upside the head and make the little twattard behave.
I thought it made alot of sense.'


- This is why I like history so much: you've seen everything happen before.
Reminds me of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta, the big dick in the region, was getting kind of embarassed by Corinth, a dwindling little second rate power thinking it was still something, throw its weight around on the even smaller states, in this case Corcyra. So Sparta's going to Athens "yeah it'll all be fine. Don't worry. Corinth's a shit but we won't go to war over it." Whilst turning up at the Corinthian doorstep telling them to behave and not to breach the pretty delicate Greek status-quo. Well, when the crunch comes, Corinth goes off their nuts and re-arms well beyond their means, invades Corcyra, sends armies to Potidaea, it's a mess. And it's not only embarassing Sparta, but it's causing Athens to think "this little second rate shit needs to be put back in its place." Yadda yadda, when push comes to shove, Sparta may be embarassed and in no mood for war, but it rallies to the side of the Corithians all the same, and the fighting broke the Greek world for 30yrs.

Why? 'Cause neither side could be seen to submit, even remotely, to the demands of the other. Their ideologies were too different, there was too much at stake, and not only that, but the hegemony for the pan-Hellenic world was on the cards.

I'm just sayin'.

Excellent post Halo and quite educational.

I think with China pulling the veritible rug from under N. Korea's feet you'll find that crazy lil dictator wondering what's what. Of course I personally think he'll still bow to his meglomania and push everyone to their wits end. It wouldn't take much to force the country into an untenable situation. One that without support from China ( N Korea can't support it'self, it lacks the infracstructure) they might just decide to push all their chips in , hoping to grab a better situation then the on they have now.

Fandros

'( N Korea can't support it'self, it lacks the infracstructure)'


- and the grain.

The use of a tomhawk would still be against numerous standing Executive orders against the assasination of Heads of State. That was the point of the post.

Rev

Let's Nuke 'em first!

If we wanted to assassinate him we would do so.

Do you really think our government is restrained by trivial matters such as executive orders?

Our last few executives have demonstrated a clear and present disregard for legality when it came to foreign policy.

In any event, this is what happens when you spend decades trying to play "hardball" with a dictator instead of robbing him of the means by which he holds absolute authority and dismantling the persistent state of war in Korea. If we had spent the 90s engaged in a real peace process and granted some trade concessions to NK in exchange for real progress in terms of democracy there (and IAEA inspections), we could have let human nature take its course.

Instead we took a page from the dictatorial playbook and constructed a persistent state of war here. Orwell would be proud.

The J Curve strikes.

A nuclear North Korea is more valuable to us stable than unstable. We arent going to do a damn thing and KJI knows it.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/World/North_Korea

well it happened, what's our response now?

Fart in their general direction.

i've had some farts that might have been a legitimate deterrant to NK.

We're going to write a strongly worded letter.

And wag the finger.

Do they have any oil? That should answer the question of what we are going to do about the test.

Do they have any oil? That should answer the question of what we are going to do about the test.

No...they have rice and kimchi.

But the question Washington woke up to Monday morning was starkly simple: what other choice does it really have? The fact is, the options available to the U.S. and its partners in trying to contain the North Korean nuclear threat are limited. Most analysts believe there is no plausible military option available: any strike on the North's nuclear facilities would give it enough time to launch artillery strikes across the border, to devastating effect in Seoul. Shoichi Nakagawa, policy chief of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, held out the prospect for further economic sanctions. "We've already imposed financial sanctions, but we'd have to raise the pressure a level by halting imports and exports and conducting inspections of ships" traveling between the two countries.



Want to invade N.K.? Going to sacrifice a lot of lives in S.K. doing so. Not that people don't already know this.

No...they have rice and kimchi.

Funny, I was under the impression they didn't even have that....

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061009/ap_on_re_as/koreas_nuclear_132;_ylt=Aqq8MEC6M6HALePkBqbO_E2Csc EA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Impoverished and isolated North Korea has relied on foreign aid to feed its 23 million people since its state-run farming system collapsed in the 1990s following decades of mismanagement and the loss of Soviet subsidies.


Ain't it a funny way to pay the world back for feeding your citizens, by becoming a Nuclear Power?

And China cant cut off all ties with North Korea and stop sending food, or to many of North Koreans will be crossing the border to China.

George W. Bush and then-Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar, in which Bush wonders why he should care about North Korea. “I get these briefings on all parts of the world,” Bush said, “and everybody is talking to me about North Korea.”



PWND!!!

It's an ugly situation indeed, hard enough without wacko's using it as a form of sport and to push their outdated ( and outvoted ) agenda.

I still have to wonder if a Black Ops coop might be the way to go with this.


I also suspect, or wonder, that the test is a fake. That it was traditional TNT trying to force concessions.

Fandros Finglaflin

I also suspect, or wonder, that the test is a fake. That it was traditional TNT trying to force concessions.



South Korea's geological institute estimated the force of the explosion to be equivalent to 550 tons of TNT, far smaller than the two nuclear bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II.

That's a lot of frikin dynamite. But you might have a point.

Or maybe because of the repression there one of them shopped at http://www.vibesnmore.com (http://www.vibesnmore.com/) and the result was an earthquake

^^ that is vibes n more by the way for those of you at work. I didn't even think as I clicked that link.

It's an ugly situation indeed, hard enough without wacko's using it as a form of sport and to push their outdated ( and outvoted ) agenda.

I still have to wonder if a Black Ops coop might be the way to go with this.


I also suspect, or wonder, that the test is a fake. That it was traditional TNT trying to force concessions.

Fandros Finglaflin

NK's ability to detonate 500 tons of TNT is not unheard of, they've done it routinely the last decade or so to level mountains and such.

However, the seismograph of a half kiloton nuke is substantially different than a half kiloton of tnt... no way they can fake that. I find it suspect it took so long for our USGS guys to release the data (if they have yet even.)

Alas, we can play games and say 'yeah right, that wasn't a real nuke' and maybe hope Kimmie spends more of his precious uranium to show us a larger detonation. /shrug

Good news that I have not read anywhere yet: If in fact they really did detonate a nuclear device, we can now obtain the signatures of their uranium isotopes. I'm no physics guy but I read Tom Clancy http://www.ayonae.ro/images/smilies/smile.gif Every nuke plant has a unique signature.... so if Kimmie gives his nukes to some terrorist and they decide to level one of our cities, we'll know who gave it to them.

I've read a few cautionary notes on this, suggesting that the nuke might not have been a nuke, but there's no reason to take any chances.

'so if Kimmie gives his nukes to some terrorist and they decide to level one of our cities, we'll know who gave it to them.'


- Oh. Good. So after 250,000 people are dead, we can at least pin it on the Koreans.


:rolleyes:

Yes this is a blurb from Foxnews...but it's still one that made me wish I had stayed in bed this morning...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,219121,00.html

They threaten to fire a weapon unless we back down on financial sanctions put in place due to a country led US cash counterfitting scheme?

aka...Do what we want, let us do what we want and maybe we won't fire a nuke...

w...t....f


Fandros Finglaflin

Jane's Defence Weekly comments (http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jdw/jdw061009_2_n.shtml) on the test:
Initial South Korean Ministry of Defence and National Intelligence Service reports indicated that a 3.58-3.7-magnitude blast was detected emanating from a North Korean nuclear test at 10.36 am local time (01:36 GMT). Subsequent reports from the US Geological Survey (USGS) place the magnitude of the tremor at 4.2 on the Richter scale. The difference in the reports is due to the fact that the USGS assessment, being somewhat later, was able to incorporate a larger number of sensor reports in its preparation.

The USGS data identifies the time and location of the blast as 9 October at 01:35:27 (GMT) and centred at 41.311—N, 129.114—E at a depth 0-1 km. This places the site approximately 42 km northwest of Kilchu, in the province of North Hamgyong, on the remote slopes of Mant'ap-san Mountain. This coincides with reports that first appeared during 2005 of suspicious tunnelling and construction activities in the area. Subsequent reports during the past month indicate that the North Koreans had excavated a 700 m-long horizontal tunnel under Mant'ap-san.

Although details are tentative, initial and unconfirmed South Korean reports indicate that the test was a fission device with a yield of .55 kT. By comparison the nuclear bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima yielded approximately 12.5 kT. The figure of .55 kT, however, seems too low given the 4.2 register on the Richter scale. This could suggest - depending upon the geological make-up of the test site - a yield of 2-12 kT. If, however, the lower yield is correct, it would suggest that the test had been a "pre- or post-detonation" event (ie a failure), as it had been anticipated that North Korea's first nuclear test would have a significantly higher yield.
Note the reason for the delay in USGS reporting that akipt found suspect (more sensors, more data to collect and assimilate). That last paragraph leaves the primary question open regarding the test's success or failure, unfortunately.

You cant get a Uranium isotope signature unless you can get near the blast site, since this was an underground detonation recovery of the isotope reading is going to be difficult to say the least.

Rev

James Bond 007 WRU!!!!

You cant get a Uranium isotope signature unless you can get near the blast site, since this was an underground detonation recovery of the isotope reading is going to be difficult to say the least.

RevI admit I don't know much about this stuff, but why would Japan send recon flights out to try and detect whether their underground detonation was in fact radioactive or not?

I think some of it does manage to get into the air no matter how deep you detonate...or maybe the size of the detonation matters and since this one was practically a fart, makes it indescernible. /shrug

I admit I don't know crap about this either, but wouldn't it depend how good the detonation was sealed whether isotopes got out?

I read this today:
In geologic conditions where containment is more effective, the "golden spikes" of radionuclide detection are isotopes of certain noble gasses, which diffuse out of the ground post-explosion. The CTBTO-IMS has radionuclide detectors in Japan and Okinawa, so the chance of getting a reliable reading is good.
The acronym stands for "Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization's International Monitoring System."