North Korea News

[Smitty-48]

The thing was, in the early Cold War, when America was freaking out in the Second Red Scare, the Soviets at the time really couldn't do anything to the CONUS, their bombers never would have gotten through, they could never have stopped SAC, and the Soviet ICBM's at the time were liquid fueled and took hours to prepare, so they probably would have gotten taken out by B-52's before they ever got off the ground.

Basically, America was totally dominant, the Soviets didn't stand a chance in World War Three. But by the mid 70's, they had acquired the Delta Class SSBN, quiet enough to evade SOSUS, capable of going up under the polar ice to hide, and even shoot from there, with long ranged MIRV'd SLBMs, at which point, the Soviets were finally in a position to engage in head to head nuclear combat with the Yanquis, for the first time ever in fact.

If they had actually done this in the open, with America on high alert, 1950's style, that probably would have set off World War Three, but because they did it in the era of Detente, America didn't really react to it, America didn't react, until the Third Red Scare, incited by Reagan.

[ssu]

The thing was, in the early Cold War, when America was freaking out in the Second Red Scare, the Soviets at the time really couldn't do anything to the CONUS, their bombers never would have gotten through, they could never have stopped SAC, and the Soviet ICBM's at the time were liquid fueled and took hours to prepare, so they probably would have gotten taken out by B-52's before they ever got off the ground.

Basically, America was totally dominant, the Soviets didn't stand a chance in World War Three. But by the mid 70's, they had acquired the Delta Class SSBN, quiet enough to evade SOSUS, capable of going up under the polar ice to hide, and even shoot from there, with long ranged MIRV'd SLBMs , at which point, the Soviets were finally in a position to enagage in head to head nuclear combat with the Yanquis, for the first time ever in fact.

And in the end the Soviet Union had more nukes than the US, and basically have been upgrading it more than the US. Soviet servicemen might starve to death on a remote radar station in Siberia as the Soviet Union was collapsing, yet the nuclear force was always kept in good order, even during the Yeltsin years.

[Smitty-48]

Yeah, I mean, the Russians are basically still dining out on the same Soviet arsenal built up in the late seventies and early eighties, the Detente Soviet Nuclear Arsenal, is the Russian Nuclear Arsenal, with a few tweaks and upgrades here and there, the Russians could never afford to build this arsenal up from scratch, they basically inherited it as a complete package.

The Soviets were spending 50% GDP on the military, the Russians spend 5%, so 5% allows to maintian what the Soviets built, but only just, and much of it will rust out over the next couple of decades, so while the Russians will still be armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, slowly but surely, the Soviet nuclear arsenal is going away, they can't replace it one for one, they are only replacing a fraction of it going forward.

At the same time, the Chinese, long the junior partners with the second rate kit, are now going in the opposite direction, they are building up an arsenal to rival the Soviets, so there will still be plenty of defense pork for the districts, as the Chinese continue to amass ever more naval and nuclear power on the horizon.

Essentially, the Russians and Chinese are swapping places, the Chinese are filling the void left in the wake of the Soviets, the Russians are collapsing down into the slot formerly occupied by the Chinese.

[DBTrek]

BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump on Friday made fresh threats of force against North Korea, writing on Twitter that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and later telling reporters that the isolated country would “truly regret it” if it attacks Guam or any other American territory.

“This man will not get away with what he’s doing, believe me,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose nation, in open defiance of the United Nations, has been developing nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States. “I hope that they are going to fully understand the gravity of what I said, and what I said is what I mean.”


Trump's comments at his private golf club here, where he is on a working vacation, came several hours after he tweeted Friday morning that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

“Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Trump added.

The president told reporters here that “those words are very, very easy to understand,” and he put the North Korean leader on notice about his intentions if threats to Guam continue.

“If he utters one threat, in the form of an overt threat — which, by the way, he has been uttering for years, and his family has been uttering for years — or if he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that's an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it, and he will regret it fast. Okay?” Trump said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 12d67c08e2

[I just Lurk]

Good post. I disagree, but it's a very good post.

What do you disagree with?

[SuburbanFarmer]

BEDMINSTER, N.J. — President Trump on Friday made fresh threats of force against North Korea, writing on Twitter that the U.S. military is “locked and loaded” and later telling reporters that the isolated country would “truly regret it” if it attacks Guam or any other American territory.

“This man will not get away with what he’s doing, believe me,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose nation, in open defiance of the United Nations, has been developing nuclear weapons capable of reaching the United States. “I hope that they are going to fully understand the gravity of what I said, and what I said is what I mean.”


Trump's comments at his private golf club here, where he is on a working vacation, came several hours after he tweeted Friday morning that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

“Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path!” Trump added.

The president told reporters here that “those words are very, very easy to understand,” and he put the North Korean leader on notice about his intentions if threats to Guam continue.

“If he utters one threat, in the form of an overt threat — which, by the way, he has been uttering for years, and his family has been uttering for years — or if he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that's an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it, and he will regret it fast. Okay?” Trump said.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... 12d67c08e2

So we're going DEFCON 1 over the next "threat"? Awesome rhetoric, clown.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Good post. I disagree, but it's a very good post.

What do you disagree with?

Mostly with the notion that both of these loons are 'rational actors' in any real sense. Both have shown little awareness of the outside world, or the dynamics at play - or even an interest in learning about them.

Trump (because I have more information about him) is by far the more dangerous one, because he really thinks that he can just push a dictator over with scare tactics. He doesn't know or care about how we got here, or what it means to the rest of the world that he's holding a finger over the The Button.

Even if we don't go to war, this is incredibly destabalizing, and could trigger a number of other issues down the road.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's possible the North Koreans are pretty rational. What they are doing now (acting crazy) gets results. They have gotten away with a lot using these tactics over the past twenty years. It remains to be seen if they are really crazy or just acting. Hopefully they will strike Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle if they are crazy enough and we can solve two problems at once.

[Smitty-48]

The North Korean's are notorious line-steppers who employ escalation dominance to get what they want, so I really don't have any issue with the POTUS giving them nowhere to go with that, because that's all you can do in response to nuclear blackmail, although, I would use less flowery speech than Trump is using, because I would actually submit that less is more when it comes to nuclear saber rattling rhetoric, "fire and fury" is not really the term of art, "all options are being considered, up to and including preemptive counterforce as necessary" is a little more to my taste.

That being said, if Trump is simply buying into the false narrative of North Korea being a Chinese proxy whose strings are pulled from Beijing, and so the whole point is simply to try to force the Chinese to rein the North Koreans in, that, again, would be a mistake. If America is going to bring things to a head with the NK's, America needs to be ready to deal with all contingencies, and not rely in any way on the Chinese coming in to save you, because contrary to the narrative, when it comes to their nuclear and missile programs, there's nothing the Chinese can do to leverage Pyongyang, anymore than any other country would allow themselves to be leveraged regarding their nuclear forces, leverage against nuclear forces, being an inherent casus belli which all nuclear armed states would go to the matresses over, come what may, as if they weren't prepared to do that, then they wouldn't have nuclear weapons in the first place.

If the North Koreans were in anyway concerned about what the Chinese had to say about it, this situation never would have come about in the first place, breaking out with hydrogen bombs and ICBM's, is an inherent assertion of that, the ultimate assertion of that in fact.

[DBTrek]

You think China is bluffing, or do you think they'd really push us off the Asian mainland if we wiped NK off the map?

I suspect if we wiped them and left, the Chinese could be pacified.
Extend South Korea up to the Chinese border, pull our troops out, and call it good.