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fishmech posted:Well yes, but you've seen who's in the White House these days. "Nothing good will come of this" = about the only thing they do. Trapped in hell, all of us.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:09
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Yandat posted:We should just leave them alone and do nothing, because that would reduce the tension and ramping up to war. Nothing good will come of a military intervention. What about North Korea's own military adventurism? Even before they had a nuclear capability they were willing to fire into South Korea and dare them or us to respond. Now that they're a nuclear power, what's to stop them from escalating those provocations? For now the answer is still us, but the people who want us to walk away have to come up with an alternative unless they think the North should just be allowed to conquer the South. The most likely alternative is for South Korea and Japan to develop nuclear capabilities of their own if the US backs away, which I guess the pro-proliferation posters in this thread wouldn't mind, but I think it should be obvious that a(nother) nuclear arms race in Asia would be less than ideal.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:10
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They'll welcome us as liberators and all the North Koreans can learn to code and make apps.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:12
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Sinteres posted:Uh nuclear war hasn't happened yet so I think you'll find that it never will and fears about proliferation are nonsense. Make no mistake that nuclear war is still a remote possibility, but the more nuclear proliferation there is the less remote it becomes. North Korea is just one country but it having nukes has already made a nuclear conflict noticeably more likely.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:23
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Fojar38 posted:Yeah, you'd have to deal with all that pesky fallout and whatnot, but that's the end result of the "really it's rational for country X to get nukes" argument. This is why proliferation is a problem. There's a pretty huge difference between what's rational for an individual country and what's best for everyone involved. It being rational for the DPRK to want nukes isn't the same as saying that it's a good thing they have them. Proliferation is explicitly a bad thing, but it's not necessarily bad for individual actors existing in a world where it's happening anyway.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:42
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If, hypothetically every country had at least 5 nukes, but the US/Russia/other large current nuclear powers still had hundreds to thousands each and the ability to deploy them from quite far flung places... Don't you think there would be a lot of nuclear countries still getting invaded or having "civil wars" started or whatever? It just makes the new low count countries end up treated the same as they are now with no nukes. Especially because what are they going to do, actually launch a nuke against a large arsenal country? They'd likely be immediately attacked back and their country destroyed.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:49
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fishmech posted:If, hypothetically every country had at least 5 nukes, but the US/Russia/other large current nuclear powers still had hundreds to thousands each and the ability to deploy them from quite far flung places... Don't you think there would be a lot of nuclear countries still getting invaded or having "civil wars" started or whatever? Getting five of your largest cities obliterated isn't worth whatever you think you'd get from military aggression.
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Sep 15, 2017 04:53
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fishmech posted:If, hypothetically every country had at least 5 nukes, but the US/Russia/other large current nuclear powers still had hundreds to thousands each and the ability to deploy them from quite far flung places... Don't you think there would be a lot of nuclear countries still getting invaded or having "civil wars" started or whatever? Betting on cold rationality prevailing in the middle of wars in which governments are toppled seems like a bad gamble. Godwin or not, we pretty much know a deranged Hitler would have ordered the use of nukes against the Soviet Union if he'd had them by the end, even if their use had been suicidal; he'd decided Germany didn't deserve to exist any longer. It's not terribly difficult to imagine other dictators with narcissistic personalities deciding that their country's survival doesn't matter if their own survival can't be assured, though I suppose their underlings might theoretically refuse the order to launch. Still, a repeated series of ambiguous events in a world like this (or any other with greater proliferation) would be a lot riskier than the world we live in now. We likely wouldn't take the bet you're proposing in the first place though. If it were that simple, and we were that reckless, we'd just destroy North Korea now, while they can't launch five nukes at us. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Sep 15, 2017 |
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Sep 15, 2017 04:58
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Paradoxish posted:There's a pretty huge difference between what's rational for an individual country and what's best for everyone involved. It being rational for the DPRK to want nukes isn't the same as saying that it's a good thing they have them. Proliferation is explicitly a bad thing, but it's not necessarily bad for individual actors existing in a world where it's happening anyway. This is one of the more straightforward and rational takes on it. North Korea's government is an entrenched and thoroughly brutal totalitarian police state whose survival relies on absolute suppression of dissent within the country, even during times of complete economic and agricultural collapse that would normally cause the general populace to protest or rebel against an aristocratic elite that stays in power through violence despite having failed the common people. This state of affairs itself is gambled on the ruling party's capacity to project brinkmanship and maximally threaten escalations against other countries, and so the ruling party does 'rationally' work towards acquiring any tool necessary to increase their potential to gently caress everything up for everyone. Brinkmanship as a survival strategy for North Korea is easily described as an unstable condition, and the way it is being composed now earnestly suggests increasing desperation or poorer gambling odds for the ruling elite of the country. And that's earnestly not good for any sorts of relations in the entire area around them, and certainly does little to actually assist the people of North Korea itself, who already exist in a rather terrible condition under some uniquely cruel leadership. I say this wisely dispensing with the whole part where people try to pipe up with increasingly tortured defenses of Korea's corrupt autocracy and its intentional provocations, but I doubt there are many paths that look good when speaking in terms of the general welfare of anyone in the region.
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Sep 15, 2017 05:14
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Yandat posted:Getting five of your largest cities obliterated isn't worth whatever you think you'd get from military aggression. There's no guarantee at all that you, ruler of South Sudan, can actually deploy your 5 nukes against say NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix or however that count goes now. There is a guarantee that if you hit even one of them the US can fire back hundredfold. Are you so sure that you as ruler of South Sudan can avoid that?
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Sep 15, 2017 05:19
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R. Guyovich posted:they've been in place since 2006 I thought the un voted on some?
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Sep 15, 2017 05:31
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The five-nukes-to-a-country hypothetical seems explicitly sociopolitically pained, and it would take little conventional analysis to understand the incentives and rationales that would change and create new and different forms of potential instability and power brokering across the world. It provides interesting power differential changes that are most circumstantially advantageous to smaller, underdeveloped or terribly developed countries in places favorable to loose league or confederacy, but circumstantially disadvantageous to the world at large and the welfare of the entire population of earth because the opportunity for nuclear crisis, war, and resulting humanitarian disasters has now gone way, way, way up. Way, way way way way.
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Sep 15, 2017 06:05
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Kavros posted:The five-nukes-to-a-country hypothetical seems explicitly sociopolitically pained, and it would take little conventional analysis to understand the incentives and rationales that would change and create new and different forms of potential instability and power brokering across the world. It provides interesting power differential changes that are most circumstantially advantageous to smaller, underdeveloped or terribly developed countries in places favorable to loose league or confederacy, but circumstantially disadvantageous to the world at large and the welfare of the entire population of earth because the opportunity for nuclear crisis, war, and resulting humanitarian disasters has now gone way, way, way up. Way, way way way way. "7 billion lives vs the perceived security of my 20 million countrymen (and also my regime but shush)? No contest, and those 7 billion are jerks who deserve it anyway."
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Sep 15, 2017 06:19
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Bip Roberts posted:What percentage of the North Korea GDP is going into this missile program? Even domestically produced it can't be remotely cheap to produce a multi stage icbm. In a command economy, GDP is a pretty useless measure of productivity. There is a market segment in the form of illegal street markets, but it's untaxed so it doesn't matter for state expenditures. The state gets its foreign currency from exports (I'm worried that the sanctions will only have the effect of forcing NK to focus more on illegal weapons trafficking), they use foreign currency to pay for certain stuff they can't produce themselves. Building a missile though is mostly a matter of industrial production and can be done with domestic resources, which they have a lot of. One important resource in a command economy is directed micromanagement, a lot of the factories get bogged down in bureaucracy and corruption because nobody's paying attention to them and nobody cares if they don't produce efficiently. The missile production line is directly monitored by the state though, meaning it can output quite a lot of production. Labor is paid directly with food rations and domestic currency (which is basically infinite, the top missile scientists probably get all kinds of extra amenities and some foreign currency as well), so it's just a matter of telling the right people to work in the right plant and making parts.
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Sep 15, 2017 07:02
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Shibawanko posted:In a command economy, GDP is a pretty useless measure of productivity. There is a market segment in the form of illegal street markets, but it's untaxed so it doesn't matter for state expenditures. The state gets its foreign currency from exports (I'm worried that the sanctions will only have the effect of forcing NK to focus more on illegal weapons trafficking), they use foreign currency to pay for certain stuff they can't produce themselves. Building a missile though is mostly a matter of industrial production and can be done with domestic resources, which they have a lot of. NK has already more or less has moved on to something more similar to the NEP at this point, most street markets are legal and private selling of produce is allowed and regulated. The state does get foreign currency from exports, but China has been allowing them to buy imports on credit. Also, it remains to be seen how much China is actually going to clamp down on exports/oil imports, they usually turn a blind eye to a lot of that activity. I assume at this point they have fairly robust domestic missile industry at this point, that said they very well may be reliant on Chinese technical equipment. Eh, the issue with "micromanagement" is usually less to do with bureaucracy and corruption on its own (this was traditional levy against the Soviets), but rather factories always struggled to meet quotas due to the fact price controls were often unrealistic and in turn this created supply shortages (that did lead to black market activity). Rather "bureaucracy and corruption" were more symptoms of the problem than the cause. Also, now it days it is quite clear (via video evidence) that there is consumer spending in North Korea, and that wages (or at least income) is enough to support a growing consumer economy. Jong-Un basically transitioned North Korea somewhere close to the Soviet Union in the 1920s/China in the 1980s.
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Sep 15, 2017 07:16
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South Korea has decided to fire two ballistics into the Eastern Sea in retaliation for NK's missile test. One hit a simulated target accurately, the other fell into the sea.
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Sep 15, 2017 08:10
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What sorts of ballistic missiles does south korea have?
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Sep 15, 2017 08:13
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Bip Roberts posted:What sorts of ballistic missiles does south korea have?
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Sep 15, 2017 08:16
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drilldo squirt posted:I thought the un voted on some? they've deepened since then, yeah. but dprk has been under sanctions for over a decade. obviously it isn't working
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Sep 15, 2017 10:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Are they visible flying over? Or too high altitude? Which is why... InflateableFerret posted:I hear that launching ICBM's over another country's airspace is a hostile act also. (it's still obviously an incredibly hostile thing to do and could have all sorts of unforeseen circumstances in case of a miscalculation or failure)
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Sep 15, 2017 15:48
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Hey guys, I had one more question: could Grahm influence Trump into launching a pre-emptive strike? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lindsey-graham-says-u-s-should-threaten-military-option-against-north-korea/
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Sep 15, 2017 15:50
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Willo567 posted:Hey guys, I had one more question: could Grahm influence Trump into launching a pre-emptive strike? No because even if he has a racist senator warmonger talking to him, he also has military leaders around him at all times telling him it's a really loving stupid idea and since they're big strong manly men he's gonna side with them.
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Sep 15, 2017 15:58
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So after the latest missile launch, Moon Jae-In said “Dialogue is impossible in a situation like this. The sanctions and pressures of the international community will be further reinforced [to make] North Korea to choose no other option but to come toward the path of the genuine dialogue.” Instead, it was quoted by news coverage as him saying that dialogue was now "impossible" and followed it with military threats. https://www.nknews.org/2017/09/moon-says-dialogue-with-north-korea-now-impossible/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/15/north-korea-latest-missile-test-south-talk-engagement The misquoting and taking out of context by a low of news coverage is pretty hosed up, especially in the headlines. Off the top of my head, there was: - China saying they would get involved and come to North Korea's aid if the US launched a pre-emptive strike, but would stay neutral if North Korea attacked first. It was reported as China saying they would stay neutral if North Korea attacked, or would stay neutral of North Korea and the US went to war. - North Korea saying they would never give up their nuclear weapons as long as the US continues to act hostile towards them. It was reported as North Korea saying they would never give up their nuclear weapons period. - North Korea laying out a potential strategy to launch missiles at the waters near Guam that they would present to Kim Jong-Un in mid-August, where he would then make a decision on what to do with it. It was reported as North Korea planning to bomb Guam in mid-August. - North Korea saying they would take a moment or two to see how the US would act, before they made a decision on their Guam plan. It was reported as North Korea backing away and cancelling their Guam plans. I know that misleading headlines and taking quotes out of context is pretty "Water is Wet" when it comes to news coverage. But this is pretty reckless and dangerous in this situation. Especially when you have a president who's getting his information by watching the news and is most likely a typical headline reader. brockan fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Sep 15, 2017 |
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Sep 15, 2017 16:20
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brockan posted:So after the latest missile launch, Moon Jae-In said “Dialogue is impossible in a situation like this. The sanctions and pressures of the international community will be further reinforced [to make] North Korea to choose no other option but to come toward the path of the genuine dialogue.” Well, since the news media's revenue is basically based on clicks, this is the eventual result. All news is click-bait. This also played a role in the last election. The situation and history are expertly covered in the book "Trust Me, I'm Lying" by Ryan Holiday.
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Sep 15, 2017 16:28
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Grouchio posted:They shot Hyunmoo-2 missiles I believe. Non-nuclear. South Korea has progressively pushed the US to allow range extensions for their missiles under the MCTR treaty, until they are now able to hit all of North Korea with the latest version of the Hyunmoo-2. Trump also recently agreed to eliminate the weight limit on the warheads. South Korea claims that they'd be used as conventional bunker busters under its goofy "decapitation force" plan, but it's hard for me to see them as anything other than a South Korean signal that they'd be able to weaponize a nuclear warhead very quickly if they decided to develop them. North Korea will have a fully-capable nuclear deterrent very soon at the current rate of development and at this point there's not much of a way to stop them. We could certainly destroy their nuclear capability, but only at an incredible cost of life on the Korean peninsula. We could attempt negotiation, but they're so close to having a deliverable nuclear weapon that they would certainly demand such great concessions to stop their program that it's hard to believe that the US would accept them today. Plus DPRK is unlikely to trust the US to follow through on any promises after our failure to live up to our side of the Agreed Framework. (I hope not a portent of the future of the Iran deal.) The DPRK has successfully demonstrated a fission-boosted or thermonuclear device, an ICBM, and a solid-fueled cold-launched SLBM. The only piece left is to show off a functional reentry vehicle for an ICBM, and it's clear they're not far away given that they have shown off successful RVs for shorter range missiles on normal (non-lofted) trajectories, like yesterday's Hwasong-12 launch. A lot of talking heads in the US have been playing down their capabilities after each test, but that's just driving the DPRK to demonstrate its growing capability with further tests. It worries me a bit that this won't stop until the DPRK launches a live warhead on an ICBM on a realistic trajectory over Japan and detonates it in the Pacific somewhere. By that point, there will be no reasonable intervention that would pry nuclear weapons out of the DPRK's hands. DPRK ICBM's that can reach the US would rightfully worry the ROK that the US wouldn't be willing to risk nuclear attack to defend them in the future, and that fear seems likely to prompt the development of a ROK nuclear program which we can imagine would be successful in short order given their technological base. The time to act was years ago--I just don't see much hope for a non-nuclear Korea at this point. We will just have to accept it as another India/Pakistan situation, and hope for positive political changes from within. We're already sanctioning DPRK so hard at this point that we have no leverage over their actions. Maybe China does, but it's getting way too late for that to matter.
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Sep 15, 2017 19:16
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whatever7 posted:China OTOH, has lower incentive to make NK lose the nuke. If China play the card right, they might angle NK the mad dog to drag US into another exhausted and costly war. Then China has a million+ refugees and a very pissed-off U.S. Armed Forces within striking distance of its probably irradiated home soil and the entire world pissed off at them for starting what'll probably be WWIII (because you know Russia's not just going to sit back and munch popcorn about all this, they have territory in the area too. I mean Vladivostok's right there).
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Sep 15, 2017 19:53
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Oracle posted:There is no way in hell China wants any US troops at its border no matter the reason. Because with Trump in charge, there's going to be no concern for collateral damage if war is actually declared. No concern over any UNESCO heritage sites or historically valuable this or that. Hell he'd probably try and use nukes either way which the ensuing fallout can't be good for the north of China and surrounding area (and the U.S. but noone's ever accused Trump of being a forward thinker). There is no way Britain is going to war with Germany over loving Belgium.
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Sep 15, 2017 20:04
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Oracle posted:There is no way in hell China wants any US troops at its border no matter the reason. Because with Trump in charge, there's going to be no concern for collateral damage if war is actually declared. No concern over any UNESCO heritage sites or historically valuable this or that. Hell he'd probably try and use nukes either way which the ensuing fallout can't be good for the north of China and surrounding area (and the U.S. but noone's ever accused Trump of being a forward thinker).
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Sep 15, 2017 20:16
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R. Guyovich posted:also anyone who knows anything about how sanctions work in practice knows placing them is a hostile act. No, it is a coercive act. That's different from a hostile act.
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Sep 15, 2017 20:26
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Time and again Orange Turd has shown that he has no stomach for truely gangster poo poo. Even if he does, America is not going to win a land war in Asia.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:04
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Not to minimize that the DPRK is being a turd by launching missiles over Japan, but here's something to keep in mind. These missiles aren't in powered flight screaming along in the atmosphere at that point. They're exoatmospheric and even if they suddenly blew up somehow, the debris would keep on trucking until it hit the atmosphere well beyond Japan. And if the guidance or structure totally screwed up and put it on a powered turn toward Japan, it is incredibly likely that the missile would tear itself apart or otherwise catestrophically fail such that it'd never get to Japan. The launched missiles would have to do the most extraordinary and weird malfunction to go from being aimed well beyond Japan to actually hitting Japan intact. Still no fun for Japan, but this isn't like a William Tell arrow shot over Japan's head. The missile was 550 km in altitude when it passed over Japan, based on open source reports.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:11
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Please forgive me if this is common knowledge, but does North Korea definitely, 100% have a hydrogen bomb? I thought I saw the nukes North Korea were capable of were in the low kiloton range.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:12
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mlmp08 posted:Not to minimize that the DPRK is being a turd by launching missiles over Japan, but here's something to keep in mind. These missiles aren't in powered flight screaming along in the atmosphere at that point. They're exoatmospheric and even if they suddenly blew up somehow, the debris would keep on trucking until it hit the atmosphere well beyond Japan. And if the guidance or structure totally screwed up and put it on a powered turn toward Japan, it is incredibly likely that the missile would tear itself apart or otherwise catestrophically fail such that it'd never get to Japan. The launched missiles would have to do the most extraordinary and weird malfunction to go from being aimed well beyond Japan to actually hitting Japan intact. Absolutely correct. Moreover, I don't think the DPRK is launching over Japan to antagonize them, it's mostly that launching over Japan is the least bad option for them to launch a long range missile on a normal trajectory. They do test on lofted trajectories that don't go over Japan, but those trajectories are not sufficient to test realistic reentry. oh dope posted:Please forgive me if this is common knowledge, but does North Korea definitely, 100% have a hydrogen bomb? I thought I saw the nukes North Korea were capable of were in the low kiloton range. The last test yield was somewhere in the hundreds of kilotons range, depending who you ask. I've seen as low as 100 kt and as high as nearly a megaton, with most trustworthy estimates falling in the 200-300 kt range. For a practical warhead, that would imply that the DPRK has at least developed a boosted fission weapon, where some fusion fuel is injected to increase the yield beyond 100 kt. On the higher end of the yield range (300+ kt), most practical designs would be true staged thermonuclear weapons with a fission primary and fusion secondary, although the British did develop a crazy boosted fission weapon with a 700 kt yield, so it's possible. On the low end, the DPRK could waste a ton of nuclear material and build a very big, very inefficient unboosted weapon with a 100-200+ kt yield just to send a message, but that actually wouldn't be very consistent with their behavior so far--all signs point to a serious development program, and not just a show to scare the rest of the world. They probably have something you could call a fusion weapon--whether or not it's a staged thermonuclear weapon is debatable, but you can expect one soon if they've mastered boosted fission. EDIT: To add context, the Chinese nuclear program tested an atomic bomb in late '64. By the end of '66 they tested a couple of 250-300 kt devices that were either boosted fission and/or layer cake thermonuclear designs. By mid-'67 they tested a 3 Mt thermonuclear weapon. China was much more backwards then, and they developed nuclear weapons quickly. With 50 years of improvements in things like sensors, electronics, and computer modeling, you would expect that the DPRK could match this progress, and they seem to be doing just that. Tetraptous fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Sep 15, 2017 |
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Sep 15, 2017 21:24
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It's also consistent with analysis that they were skipping straight to 2nd gen nuclear weapons designs. Plus efficient tactical nuclear weapons are boosted fission designs, even if they don't have thermonuclear devices yet.
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Sep 15, 2017 21:41
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mlmp08 posted:No, it is a coercive act. That's different from a hostile act. Uh, if you cut off oil/energy supplies to a country that is most definitely a hostile act Yandat posted:Are you implying the US might be a bad faith actor who can't be trusted to uphold their own agreements? For evidence of this please see all of US history
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Sep 15, 2017 22:14
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I don't understand why Japan doesn't do something themselves over this 
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Sep 15, 2017 22:29
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Empress Brosephine posted:I don't understand why Japan doesn't do something themselves over this Do what? They don't trade with NK in the first place and their constitution limits their military forces to purely defensive actions.
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Sep 15, 2017 22:52
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Lurking Haro posted:Do what?
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Sep 15, 2017 22:56
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Chomskyan posted:Uh, if you cut off oil/energy supplies to a country that is most definitely a hostile act It is coercion and may indicate "hostility" but "hostile act" typically means an act that could* be accepted as an act of war. *depending on your political and military will. Still, I acknowledge that a lot of people will quibble on definitions ad nauseum.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:08
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Empress Brosephine posted:I don't understand why Japan doesn't do something themselves over this Ramping up the military is unpopular in Japan. It's not just their constitution preventing it. I guess getting nuked twice does that to you.
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Sep 15, 2017 23:31
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