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[Sigulbard]

It happened again

[Just Some Guy]

Check this out.
Looks like the military's starting to crack, if only a little.

[Owlbread]

We're certainly one step closer to war with this Kaesong situation. Again, I will remain doubtful until the first shot is fired.

[Culise]

Check this out.
Looks like the military's starting to crack, if only a little.

Let's certainly hope they don't crack outright.  AFP (the French equivalent of the AP) literally just reported that the North Korean General Staff has been given "final approval" for nuclear strikes, in yet another display of brinksmanship.  I wonder if they're getting worried that they haven't been able to extract concessions yet as they've managed in the past. 

[RedKing]

Check this out.
Looks like the military's starting to crack, if only a little.

Best outcome now might be a Kiel mutiny type situation. General Staff orders its starving soldiers to prepare for a final apocalyptic showdown, soldiers decide "Fuck that noise" and remember that their guns shoot just as well at officers as they do the enemy.

Then again....mass rebellion and civil unrest in North Korea probably wouldn't be a whole lot better. Especially if the current regime sees their power disintegrating, they might actually set us up the bomb. 

[Owlbread]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/northkorea/9970346/Pentagon-sends-missile-defences-to-Guam-as-North-Korea-approves-nuclear-attack-on-US.html

It's been enough to get the Americans in gear, anyway.

[IronyOwl]

This ain't good.

Actually, this seems to make it sound much better. As noted, they're free to go whenever they like; they just haven't because the companies on site want them to stay and keep working because they know they won't be able to come back if they do leave. They also did this before under similar circumstances, so it sounds more like posturing in response to posturing than anything genuinely dangerous.

That said, it does look like a sign that relations are far more stressed than usual.

Check this out.
Looks like the military's starting to crack, if only a little.

So... I wonder where that leaves NK. Truth be told their military isn't much anyway, so they could probably just ignore this and be "fine," but I'm curious if that'll put more stress on command in thinking they're running out of time. If that happens, best case they'll be willing to lose face and break off without concessions, worst case... I dunno. Maybe they'd do something stupid, but they've gotta know that anything major would be a really bad idea.

I guess my main concern is that they don't know how to break off in a game of chicken. A newish despot in a paranoid, isolated, somewhat desperate, heavily militarized nation might be kind of likely to have some of that problem.

Let's certainly hope they don't crack outright.  AFP (the French equivalent of the AP) literally just reported that the North Korean General Staff has been given "final approval" for nuclear strikes, in yet another display of brinksmanship.  I wonder if they're getting worried that they haven't been able to extract concessions yet as they've managed in the past. 

They still don't have any nukes to use though, do they? Sounds like more defensive Don't Mess With Us rhetoric. Apparently those bombers the US has backing up SK really get under NK's skin.

Which makes sense, of course. If someone had weapons that could blow up anything anywhere without warning or any possibility of doing anything about them, I'm thinking most people would be a bit apprehensive about them. Sort of the issue with nuclear weapons, after all.

Best outcome now might be a Kiel mutiny type situation. General Staff orders its starving soldiers to prepare for a final apocalyptic showdown, soldiers decide "Fuck that noise" and remember that their guns shoot just as well at officers as they do the enemy.

Then again....mass rebellion and civil unrest in North Korea probably wouldn't be a whole lot better. Especially if the current regime sees their power disintegrating, they might actually set us up the bomb. 

Among other issues, there's just not enough stuff, notably food, to go around. I wouldn't have much hope for whoever can properly wrangle a mass military uprising being the best of leaders under normal circumstances, but as it stands you're just asking for the military to grab and keep all the food and then work from there. Even if things got better, they'd probably get better in that context.

Which... I guess might still be better than the current situation, but I'm kind of dubious.

Then again, if there's an internal coup the US or China (or maybe even SK, especially if they're worried about the aforementioned) might feel justified going in officially and straightening things out. That'd probably be better than the current situation, but it'd be rife with all sorts of different problems.

[RedKing]

One of the biggest being if the US and China BOTH feel justified in going in to straighten things out. That's kinda how we got a divided Korea and divided Germany in the first place -- the US and USSR both going "I'm helping!" and then having radically different ideas on what a "helped" Korea/Germany should look like.

I don't think there's room for North North Korea and South North Korea. 

[Mephansteras]

Eh, the way I see it one of three things is going to happen.

1) The US/SK back down and give the NK stuff to make them shut up and go away, as has happened so many times in the past
2) NK backs down, because despite their bluster they know that they'd lose in a war and the ruling caste likes things the way they are. Some excuse will be made about a subordinate doing something unauthorized and someone will probably have a really bad day, but things go back to normal.
3) NK's leader refuses to back down and is replaced by the rest of the government for putting the rest of them at risk. Probably because of an 'American' assassin, which raises tensions for a bit but ultimately dies down, especially if the US gives them aid to quiet them back down.

[Owlbread]

I think only the North Koreans should decide their nation's future, not the USA or China. It's their right of self determination. They can't just carve up the country based on what suits them best.

I'm actually in favour of Kim il-sung's unification model; a Confederation of Korea where the two states/systems exist in devolved forms, albeit within a greater state. Obviously the North needs to be reformed to the point that it's democratic, but keeping at least some kind of a Socialist system in place in the North will help to ease the transition. We only need to think of how hard it was for East Germans to adjust to the Capitalist system.

[Scoops Novel]

It sounds a little too possible that the North Korea's are after some form of token victory, and as such, I'd rather this thread didn't make a game out of it. If thing's cool off, then you can return to Best Korea, which i suspect is right up there (though not on this forum) with Somalian pirate jokes in the something should be happening but I'm going to avoid thinking about it too much. That's includes the all caps title, though i understand it wasn't intentional. None of us want to look at a thread for pissing about if anything does happen.

[Guardian G.I.]

I've read an article by Andrei Lankov, a professor at Seoul's Kookmin University and a specialist in Korean studies which states that according to reports coming from North Korean defectors, it hasn't experienced famine since the 1990s. The North Korean government deliberately spreads fake reports about poor harvests in order to get free food from relief organizations.
The war threats are just another method to get free stuff. The DPRK exploits its status in order to leech off South Korea and the US.

[Culise]

Let's certainly hope they don't crack outright.  AFP (the French equivalent of the AP) literally just reported that the North Korean General Staff has been given "final approval" for nuclear strikes, in yet another display of brinksmanship.  I wonder if they're getting worried that they haven't been able to extract concessions yet as they've managed in the past. 

They still don't have any nukes to use though, do they? Sounds like more defensive Don't Mess With Us rhetoric. Apparently those bombers the US has backing up SK really get under NK's skin.

Which makes sense, of course. If someone had weapons that could blow up anything anywhere without warning or any possibility of doing anything about them, I'm thinking most people would be a bit apprehensive about them. Sort of the issue with nuclear weapons, after all.

They claim they have nukes and the ability to hit U.S. mainland targets.  The former is questionable and the latter is almost certainly not possible with what we know about their capabilities.  It is generally believed that their breeder reactors have been running for long enough to have produced enough plutonium or enriched uranium for dozens of war heads, and we do know for an almost-certain fact that they have set off high-yield explosives in underground tests three times in 2006 (believed to be a fizzle), 2009, and February this year (both believed to be successes), since underground testing can be detected using seismometry and radiometry.  It could genuinely (and is generally assumed to) be nuclear testing, or theoretically, just them smuggling equivalent amounts of conventional explosives into an underground bunker before setting it off all in one go.  The lack of radionuclides after the 2009 and 2013 tests (which I didn't know about before writing up this post, and learned about only pursuing the notion of a conventional cause) could possibly mean the latter, but the depth of the explosions would also explain why no radiation would have escaped to the surface.  The real issue isn't just nuclear weapons, but also delivery systems - nuclear warheads are heavy blighters, after all.  Their largest missiles, capable of striking the U.S. West Coast, were never successfully tested, with the exception of the Eunha-3 used to put a satellite in orbit a few months ago (and even that failed to maintain the originally-intended orbit).  Their primary missile arsenal's lifting ability is unknown, but they can certainly hit Japan or Guam with these missiles, hence the Americans expediting the transfer of a missile defense system to their base in Guam.  What they can do, however, is load a warhead into a nondescript truck or tramp freighter, drive it into Seoul or sail it into some Japanese or American port, and set the thing off.  This is, obviously, a nightmare scenario given the difficulty in finding a single cargo container in a single cheap freighter in a busy port like Tokyo Bay or Los Angeles Harbor, but it would purely be a weapon of terror - it would have no deeper strategic or tactical implications to the survival (or rather, the imminent lack therein) of the DPRK leadership.  Alternately, they could use the things as land mines, which is almost as disturbing as the old Davy Crocketts. 

That said, I agree that it's intended as a warning against a ROK/American preemptive strike, basically claiming that even a decapitation strike won't stop a nuclear retaliation from their theoretical arsenal.  Not that a preemptive strike is likely, but the DPRKs can't be expected to know or trust that.  Still, desperate people do desperate things, and being shot by your own people can really put a crimper on your day. 

[Another]

With the tiny amount of trade these isolationist guys are doing smuggling a nuke is not an easy task. I hope that it is practically impossible.

Doesn't US monitor all ships that enter NK ports? It is probably possible to transfer the device to a second ship in a third country's port but that adds more points of failure to the plan. Does NK have submarines capable of shaking US subs off its tail?

[Loud Whispers]

With the tiny amount of trade these isolationist guys are doing smuggling a nuke is not an easy task. I hope that it is practically impossible.

Doesn't US monitor all ships that enter NK ports? It is probably possible to transfer the device to a second ship in a third country's port but that adds more points of failure to the plan. Does NK have submarines capable of shaking US subs off its tail?

Not ones big enough to smuggle a nuclear warhead.