I/IV. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/7/29/1685321/-Missile-test-disconcerting-But-talk-of-a-pre-emptive-military-strike-on-North-Korea-is-far-more-so
Missile test disconcerting. But talk of a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea is far more so By Meteor Blades Sunday Jul 30, 2017 · 5:44 AM IST Kim Jong-Un Kim Jong-Un, supreme leader of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, hugs a military official after successfull missile launch July 4. SiegfriedHecker North Korea tested another inter-continental ballistic missile this week. The Hwasong-14. It only flew in a trajectory that took it 2,300 miles into space and 620 miles down-range to splash in the ocean well off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost major island. Based on expert assessments, however, this latest creation of the three-generation Kim dynasty is capable of reaching not just Alaska or Hawaii, but Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C. So, as has been predicted as far back as 2001, working ICBMs are now being built in this relic of the Cold War. And yet satellite photos still show almost no city lights brightening the North Korean night, a stark contrast with all the nations around it, including the glittering South from which the so-called Hermit Kingdom has been divided for seven decades. Another nation in which bloated military spending takes precedence over real human needs. The latest launch—North Korea’s 14th test this year—rated an “Uh-oh” headline from the editors at Vox. There, Alex Ward was first to report the apparent capabilities of the missile, which seems to be the same model as the one launched 25 days ago to considerable murmuring in Washington: The missile was fired late Friday night North Korea time, and was in the air for around 45 minutes, according to analysts. Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea’s missile program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, estimates that the missile is capable of traveling around 10,000 km, or around 6,200 miles. A few hours later, The New York Times reported: “Depending on how heavy a warhead it carries, this latest North Korean missile would easily reach the West Coast of the United States with a range of 9,000 to 10,000 kilometers,” or 5,600 to 6,200 miles, said Kim Dong-yub, a defense analyst at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam University in Seoul. “With this missile, North Korea leaves no doubt that its missile has a range that covers most of the United States.” What’s not known—or if known, the information remains classified—is how good the North Koreans’ missile navigation system is and whether they have as yet miniaturized a nuclear weapon to fit atop the Hwasong-14. As far as the latter goes, if they haven’t yet done so, it surely won’t be long. How to deal with this situation has baffled three presidencies, all of them determined to keep North Korea from getting nukes or missiles capable of delivering them. Diplomacy has failed. U.N. resolutions have failed. Economic sanctions have failed. Trying to get the Chinese to do more than make condemnatory statements about Kim Jong-un’s actions have failed. And bluster-bluffing, as Donald Trump has done, has obviously failed. Just as Sen. Lindsay Graham’s boast in April has failed: Graham said that he advised the president to "tell China that if you don't take care of it, we will." "It means that if China can't stop the regime from building a missile that can one day hit the American homeland that we would do everything, including diplomatic sanctions and military strike, to stop the missile program," he said. That one day has now come and gone. Before him, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also posited the idea of a military strike, saying in March that the U.S. would not go back to the bargaining table unless the North denuclearizes, noting that: “all options are on the table,” and that if the North Koreans “elevate the threat of their weapons program to a level that we believe requires action,” the option of a preventive military strike would be considered. But, Graham and Tillerson to the contrary, there is no military option. …. Let me take it back. Of course there are always military options. Stupid ones. Even James “Mad Dog” Mattis doesn’t sugarcoat it: “A conflict in North Korea … would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes,” Secretary of Defense James Mattis told CBS News. “The bottom line is it would be a catastrophic war if this turns into a combat if we’re not able to resolve this situation through diplomatic means.” War hawks usually like to make it sound clean and surgical. Like those drone attacks that never kill any wedding guests. But even the narrowest attack on North Korea with any hope of being effective would be messy and the response would be uncontainable without massive escalation. Fatalities could make those of the 1950-53 Korean War pale by comparison. Look at the options. A preemptive conventional attack solely directed at North Korea’s nuclear facilities would be unlikely to totally wipe out the nation’s nuclear capability. In an interview two months ago with Elisabeth Eaves at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Siegfried Hecker—emeritus director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a senior fellow at Stanford University who is one of the few outsiders to have visited North Korean nuclear facilities—said: “there is no conceivable way the United States could destroy all North Korean nuclear weapons. It is not possible to know where they all are. Even if a few could be located, it would be difficult to destroy them without causing them to detonate and create a mushroom cloud over the Korean peninsula.” No doubt the heavily militarized dictatorship would respond massively. If the regime has a dozen or so nukes, which it certainly could have by now, it wouldn’t take ICBMs to deliver them to the South. The North already has intermediate- range missiles capable of carrying miniaturized nukes to anywhere in the South or Japan. Even without nukes, the 25 million Koreans in the capital of Seoul and its immediate surrounds are well within the range of the North’s prodigious long-range artillery. As are 28,000 U.S. troops. The North also has more than a million active-duty troops and nearly 8 million reservists. It has vast amounts of mobile armor, helicopters, and other equipment. Not that the North’s military is a match for U.S. might. But this would not be, as someone infamously said of the Iraq invasion, a “cakewalk.” Obviously, using just a fraction of its own nukes, the United States could quickly turn parts of the North into pavement if it so desired, which would bring an end to that nation’s nuclear development and kill a few million people in the process. Fallout would injure and kill untold numbers in the South as well as in China, for which Beijing would not likely respond with: “It’s okay. We understand. Just collateral damage. Not your fault.” So pick any stupid option: A narrow, conventional attack on nuclear facilities and maybe some other military installations. Or a broad conventional attack on those facilities, strikes on troop concentrations, maybe even ground incursions across the 62-year-old Demilitarized Zone. Or a nuclear attack. “Bad” and “worse” don’t do justice to how terrible the toll would be from 1,2 or, obviously, 3. There is, of course, sabotage and cyberwarfare. But the U.S. has engaged in those for some time already and still the Hwasongs fly and the nukes are tested. Some observers have labeled Kim Jong-un nuts and worry that his saber-rattling means he really will launch some of those missiles one day. But will he? Is he really unschooled on what a literal firestorm would rain down on his nation if he sent nukes toward Seoul, Tokyo, or Chicago? That seems doubtful. His stance all along seems to have been to use the nukes he’s building as a deterrent, an ego-booster, and a matter of patriotic pride he can use to further manipulate the population he so ruthlessly oppresses. Nuclear-tipped ICBMs as defensive, not offensive weapons. But that’s an optimistic assessment with disastrous consequences if it’s wrong. Time after time, diplomacy has failed. Yet it still provides the best hope for avoiding the horrors our hawks allege North Korea is preparing visit it on us. The path forward on that score is not clear. Especially so given that the guy in the White House believes foreign policy negotiations are no different than those included in The Art of the Deal, a book with his name on it that he didn’t write. II/IV. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4743268/Trump-attack-weapons-site-North-Korea-year.html Donald Trump will attack weapons site in North Korea 'within the next year' after communist state said it had successfully fired a ballistic missile By MICHAEL POWELL FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY PUBLISHED: 02:17 BST, 30 July 2017 | UPDATED: 04:43 BST, 30 July 2017 Donald Trump is poised to order a military strike against North Korea ‘within the next year’ after the communist state said it had successfully fired a ballistic missile capable of hitting the US mainland. Senior military sources in Washington DC told The Mail on Sunday that Pentagon officials have laid out plans to obliterate a nuclear weapons facility operating deep within a mountain in the rogue state. Donald Trump is poised to order a military strike against North Korea ‘within the next year’. The missile launched by North Korea could reach New York The move, which could spark retaliation attacks from dictator Kim Jong-Un, would be a major step towards all-out war to stop North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. It comes after North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of 6,500 miles on Friday night. The Pentagon said the missile flew about 2,300 miles almost straight up before plunging into the sea off Japan about 620 miles from its launch site. Experts in the US said the missile could have hit Chicago or even New York if it had been launched on a flatter trajectory. Kim Jong-Un claimed the whole of the US could be hit ‘at any place and time’. America responded with live firing exercises by US troops in South Korea yesterday. President Trump vowed to ‘take all necessary steps’ to ensure the security of the US and its allies. [Video] III/IV. http://www.fox32chicago.com/news/national/270873794-story Latest North Korean missile could easily hit US mainland, including Los Angeles, Denver & Chicago POSTED: JUL 29 2017 04:14PM CDT UPDATED: JUL 29 2017 04:14PM CDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The missile launched Friday by North Korea was an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the Pentagon said, marking the second time this month Kim Jong Un has demonstrated a theoretical capability of striking a portion of U.S. territory. The missile was launched on a lofted, or heightened, trajectory that limited the distance it traveled, but data collected by U.S. radars, satellites and other sensors showed that it was theoretically capable of traveling at least 5,500 kilometers on a normal trajectory. That is the minimum distance to be classified by the U.S. as an ICBM. Experts told CNN that this missile could have made it all the way to Chicago. The New York Times spoke to a different expert who described the range as "most of the United States." President Donald Trump has said he will not allow North Korea to obtain an ICBM that can deliver a nuclear warhead. "We assess that this missile was an intercontinental ballistic missile, as had been expected," a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, said. He said it was estimated to have traveled about 1,000 kilometers, or 620 miles, before landing in the Sea of Japan. The North American Aerospace Defense Command determined the missile did not pose a threat to North America, he said. On July 4, North Korea launched a ballistic missile that was the judged by the U.S. to be of ICBM range -- the first of its kind for North Korea. Private analysts estimated that if it had been launched on a normal trajectory, it could have reached parts of Alaska. IV. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-missile.html North Korea’s Nuclear Arms Sustain Drive for ‘Final Victory’ The Interpreter By MAX FISHER JULY 29, 2017 A mystery has long surrounded North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Conventional wisdom holds that the North’s weapons are intended to address the country’s two greatest problems — military inferiority and economic weakness — by deterring the United States and extracting concessions. But in practice, the weapons make both problems worse by increasing the risk of war and ensuring continued sanctions. So what is driving the North’s actions? Earlier assessments pegged the country as irrational or warped by its own ideology. But virtually every expert now dismisses those explanations, saying that North Korea has managed its history-defying survival too cannily to be anything but coldly rational. And with each test, most recently the launching on Friday of a missile that according to some estimates could strike most of the United States, the contours of a far more ambitious strategy grow clearer. “People keep asking, ‘What do they want, why do they test these missiles?’ ” said Joshua H. Pollack, the editor of The Nonproliferation Review. “But they are telling us very clearly.” The country says that it plans — and analysts increasingly take this claim seriously — to force the world to accept it as a full member of the international community and, eventually, to reconcile with the United States and South Korea on its terms. North Korea envisions the United States one day concluding that it has grown too powerful to coerce and the status quo too risky to maintain, leading Washington to accept a grand bargain in which it would drop sanctions and withdraw some or all of its forces from South Korea. Photo A Hwasong-14 intercontinental ballistic missile being launched late Friday from an undisclosed location in North Korea. CreditKCNA, via KN, via Associated Press As a show of global acceptance, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would then be welcomed in foreign capitals and at the United Nations. This political agenda, much like North Korea’s push for an intercontinental ballistic missile, was once dismissed as bluster. But the country’s actions suggest it means what it says. Experts believe North Korea is likely to fall short of its grander ambitions, which appear premised on the kind of miscalculations to which new nuclear powers are often prone. Still, more modest goals, like a grudging global acceptance, may be more feasible. Even if North Korea’s own leaders consider success unlikely, they may have judged, with some reason, that this is their country’s only shot at long-term survival. The China Course The key to understanding North Korea’s strategy may lie in the recent past of another Asian nuclear state: China. Mao Zedong’s China began, in the 1950s, as a pariah state, isolated and threatened by the United States. It became, in the 1960s, a rogue nuclear power. And then it rose, through the 1970s, into an accepted member of the international community, embraced even by its onetime adversary. North Korea appears bent on following that progression. A nuclear program that can threaten the United States, making war unthinkable, would be only step one — and may, with the missile tests this summer, now be complete. China ultimately won acceptance by playing the United States against the Soviet Union, not by rattling nuclear sabers. Its size and power also made it impossible for other nations to ignore it, advantages that North Korea lacks. But North Korea’s desperation, as well as its longtime obsession with China, may have led it to see the possibility, however misguided, of achieving success by following Beijing’s script. Photo Kim Jong-un, right, the North Korean leader, celebrating the test launch of the Hwasong-14 missile on Friday.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images “You can see in their language and their approach that they are modeling all this on basically China and the U.S.,” Mr. Pollack said. North Korea regularly offers the United States high-level envoy exchanges and even sports diplomacy. The Harlem Globetrotters visited in 2013; Dennis Rodman has made multiple trips. These outreaches, though dismissed as meaningless or just eccentric, appear taken from the history of Beijing’s approach a half-century earlier, with echoes of the so-called Ping-Pong diplomacy. Though it is difficult to imagine today an American president flying to Pyongyang to shake Mr. Kim’s hand and normalize relations, it was not much easier, in the 1960s, to picture President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 trip to Beijing. “The key to understanding Kim Jong-un’s long-term strategy has to do with ‘byungjin,’ ” said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. Byungjin, or parallel advance, is Mr. Kim’s policy of developing the economy alongside the nuclear program. “Ideally, from his perspective, he could replicate the Chinese model by normalizing foreign relations, from the U.S. down, on the basis of a nuclear deterrent,” Mr. Delury said. Only then, with its economy, in theory, allowed to catch up to its neighbors’ and its leadership accepted abroad, could North Korea feel secure. The country often explains its weapons as serving these goals, and it often ties its weapons tests to relatively small demands, like ending American military exercises on the peninsula. Mr. Pollack stressed that North Korea sees itself as playing a long game, in which small concessions add up over generations. Mr. Kim, who could hold power for decades, has time. The Taiwan Corollary A more radical version of North Korea’s strategy, Mr. Pollack said, drives toward “what they call the final victory: reunification.” Experts disagree on whether North Korea remains intent on assimilating the South under its rule, as it tried with a 1950 invasion and subsequent efforts at destabilizing South Korea’s government. But the North continues to claim that as its goal, announcing the missile test on Friday with a pledge to “achieve the final victory.” Photo A joint missile exercise conducted on Saturday by the United States and South Korea at an undisclosed location in South Korea. CreditSouth Korea'S Joint Chiefs of Staff European Pressphoto Agency “North Korea has consistently proclaimed its determination to unify the homeland and behaved accordingly,” B. R. Myers, a North Korea scholar at Dongseo University in South Korea, wrote in a research paper last year. Reunification, Mr. Myers wrote, would be “the only long-term solution to the regime’s chronic security problems.” South Korea’s overwhelming prosperity in comparison with its neighbor leaves the North with little reason to exist as a separate state. This legitimacy crisis poses a danger just as existential as American military power. The North’s leaders appear to have concluded, Mr. Myers wrote, “that unification would not be possible as long as U.S. troops remained in the South,” leading them to develop weapons that could be used to force an American exit. While such goals might sound ridiculous to American ears, Mr. Pollack believes that North Korea sees this, again, as part of the Chinese model that worked once before. For years, the United States recognized Taiwan, where it based troops, as the rightful Chinese government. But that relationship flipped in 1979, when the United States normalized ties with Beijing and broke its alliance with Taiwan. North Korea may hope to use a similar playbook, splitting the United States from South Korea. The break would not need to be so drastic to fulfill the North’s goals; official neutrality would do. Beijing’s stated goal of reunification with Taiwan will not happen for decades, if ever, but few doubt its sincerity. North Korea may similarly see reunification prospects as remote and generations away but still essential. Nuclear Ambitions, Nuclear Risks Research on nuclear diplomacy offers two lessons: that North Korea’s strategy is likely to fail and that the country is likely to try anyway. Nuclear threats rarely succeed in extracting concessions from adversaries, according to a book-length study by the political scientists Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann. Nuclear threats are simply not believable; the consequences of using the weapons are seen as too great to be credible. As a result, nuclear states are less likely to successfully coerce an adversary than non-nuclear states, which can more credibly threaten war. And because nuclear weapons heighten the risk to both sides, they tend to lock the status quo in place — the opposite of North Korea’s goal. Mr. Kim, the research by Mr. Sechser and Mr. Fuhrmann suggests, has greatly enhanced his ability to deter the United States from invading. But if he is hoping to force the United States into a major policy change, he is headed for disappointment. But North Korea may overestimate its chances. Michael C. Horowitz, of the University of Pennsylvania, found that new nuclear powers are more prone to aggression. And Colin H. Kahl, a Georgetown University political scientist, wrote in 2014 that, regardless of whether nuclear weapons actually work for extracting concessions, “new nuclear states appear to believe they do, at least for some period of time, and act accordingly.” This may pose the gravest risk to both the United States and North Korea itself. Should Mr. Kim miscalculate with his nuclear threats, there is a small chance he could blunder into war. In a war, nuclear powers with small arsenals, like North Korea, would feel strong pressure to fire quickly before their weapons are destroyed, even if they believe they will lose, according to research by Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at George Washington University. While such a situation is remote, the North’s strategic ambitions have introduced this risk. If the world wishes to avoid these risks, Mr. Myers wrote, it would need to confront the “troubling explanations for North Korea’s armament, instead of continuing to ignore them.” The Interpreter is a column by Max Fisher and Amanda Taub exploring the ideas and context behind major world events. Follow them on Twitter @Max_Fisher and @amandataub. A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2017, on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: North Korea’s Nuclear Arms Sustain Drive for ‘Final Victory’. Order Reprints| Today's Paper -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
