North Korea to be attacked; U.S. Nuclear first strike "likely" - Trustable info?, page 13

reply to post by detachedindividual

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He was incompetent. But he was not 'retarded'.

I was not rewriting history to glorify him, I was just setting the record straight. Granted, he wasn't anywhere close to the greatest President ever, but he was not 'retarded'. A moron when it comes to making decisions perhaps, but not intellectually stupid.

Back to the thread, no we would not attack first. That would be a violation of international law. South Korea or Japan may attack them, but I know we would not attack them first.

[edit on 5/30/2009 by FadeToBlack]

reply to post by infinite

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Correct... people... if there were any military plans at all and a site (any website) printed anything about it... the site would go down... immediately.
Therefore: proven false.

reply to post by Schaden

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Originally posted by Schaden
I only advocated a first strike in the event of a massive land invasion. We're bound by treaty to defend South Korea, however I believe the pentagon would sooner resort to tactical nukes than lose tens of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands in a grueling useless land war. Of course this president wouldn't authorize it.

You may not be too far off from reality. Its politically unthinkable, but doctrine and protocol does legitmize the use of tactical nukes in a situation such as a North Korean invasion. The U.S. military commanders will have to question how many American and South Korean troops they are willing to lose in such a situation and if it would be worth the effort in the end. The trick is how to convince South Korea the usage of nukes is in the long run a better solution.

I don't know if air power alone could defend them.

That is actually a major concern held by strategists and analysts who have studied the situation in Korea. Its like a mini-1980s Europe situation. South Korea isn't exactly bursting with U.S. and ROK troops and the amount of airpower is limited indeed. If North Korea gets its timing right, it could also avoid a situation where the U.S. could have upwards to six carriers availiable for response. When you factor in logistics, it most certainly does raise the question as to whether air power alone can hold off the DPRK.

A few dozen low yield warheads would sufficiently break their will. Destroy all retaliatory nuclear weapons and infrastructure in a first strike, and lay down a row of impacts evenly spaced across the border, creating a wasteland and breaking their lines.

In truth, less than a dozen would do the trick. The impoverished state of the North Korean economy means a single nuke would cripple them for good.

The US never takes anything off the table including nuclear weapons. It's a war N. Korea can't win, because I believe the US would go nuclear against them rather than lose S. Korea. Like I said, I believe DPRK knows this. The chance of a full scale invasion is slim.

[edit on 30-5-2009 by Schaden]

North Korea cannot win, but the havoc they can wreak on the ROK and perhaps Japan is tremendous. The U.S. may be successful in defeating the invasion, but they will most certainly fail in protecting South Korean life and property.

As for the chances of a full-scale invasion, never say never. Korea was a supporting theater during the Cold War, but as someone once said, in no place was the Cold War hotter than on the Korean Peninsula.

[edit on 30-5-2009 by sweatmonicaIdo]

reply to post by Schaden

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North korea going into the south is different than israel going into palestien then?And you know they will again and again.Also you know aswell as I do they want the whole place even if it means slowly over time.
Nothing done by the US in the gaza situation only waffling as they also know.

So the so called reasons why the US may nuke NK,is becuse of the WMDs the country may have and the threat to the region.Heard that one before.

It was said of saddam, WMDs he didnt have and being a threat to the region.
No nuke used but a land war happened.It was ok for troops to die in Iraq so they could keep raising their bank balances.

Why use nukes.
Nothing there to go into to pillage.So we'll be kind and not sentence our own troops to death this time.
But be sure there's other things in the pipeline to get back to doing it.

Originally posted by bpg131313
It’s good to hear from you. Let’s dive into what was said.

Hi bpg, lets!

You made good observations regarding Japan. Having several Japanese friends myself, I often times get emails from them telling me what they are hearing around Japan. When it comes to the affairs of Japan, we have been involved ever since General Douglas MacArthur had his hands in the Occupation of Japan. You may remember from history class that he also led the UN forces against North Korea in 1950-1951. Japan has had us protecting them since then.

Yup, i think they were observations that most Japanese would share in terms of just how able ( second largest economy on Earth and without all the accounting fraud probably not as far behind the US as looks) they would be to defend themselves or massively expand their armed forces and strategic capabilities. That is not something China or Russia would like to see but frankly i am not overly concerned with their concerns. I must disagree as to the fact that Japan 'had' the US do anything; the US chose to keep Japan relatively disarmed so as to best use the excuse to use Japan as a military staging base for their own propagation of the capitalist system in general. The US has done this to a number of countries ( most European countries could massively expand their armed forces) at massive cost to the US tax payer; obviously something few Americans are aware of. The empire likes to have allies but if you let them get too strong and assertive well then you have problems.

It’s a routine I suppose you can say. We also owe them a lot of money, so perhaps this is their way of using our debt to them as leverage. I know Japan could put together a top-notch nuclear program if they wanted to.

I agree. Japan were allowed to undermine the American heavy industry in significant ways ( long before China, Taiwan and South Korea came on the scene) so as to create markets and provide them with the payoffs that would keep their leadership pliant and without much reason to fight for a independent course of Japan. This is what the Romans and practically every other empire did to keep their client states/allies in line and sooner or later it has the very same result on the empires original stronghold. I heard the rumours about how quickly Japan could put together a nuclear arsenal a decade ago so perhaps it's even faster today...

Japan already has extensive PATRIOT systems brought in by the US. The odds of an incoming missile getting through are low. The problem today is the pace at which things can escalate. A large scale missile barrage could occur over the course of two hours. That’s all they need...two hours! Things can get to be looking similar to your avatar in that very brief amount of time.

I don't put much faith in the patriot system itself but perhaps the Japanese will not accept the assurances and modify it in ways that might enable a better interception record than in the last few times i didn't even manage to stop scuds and as ancient silkworms. Either way i could go into a great deal of detail as to how the British home office prepared hundreds of thousands of death 'cerficates' as that is the type of casualties they expected based on the 'bomber always go trough' pre war data. As we all know that wasn't the case and the entire Luftwaffe campaign killed about 40 000 Brits. I expect that these prompt casualties are overstated even if no precautions are taken and in fact were used back then to discourage such preparations as, well, it wouldn't be 'enough'; same logic employed with MAD despite the fact testing showed just how much you could do to limit casualties to a small percentage.

Either way my Avatar doesn't involve a nuclear blast, a sunrise really, and if this link to my profile works you should get a bit more detail of the 'assassin' (created by Cpt based Dave Wilson)

media.abovetopsecret.com...&action=view&id=22658

South Korea is in the same boat as I just discussed. We’re not talking days. We’re talking immediate. When I was there I was told that five minutes is all the time we have from launch to impact. Five minutes!

But this would be unlikely to happen without a period of escalation when a significant proportion of South Koreans could be evacuated to safer areas. Admittedly five minutes isn't much but then a artillery shell or scud isn't exactly nuclear tipped; well not yet.

I’m sure that other countries would protest a military action, but those are simply words, nothing more. The North Koreans could be in Seoul within two hours if they took their time. I know that South Korea is very heavily armored. I know it would be one hell of a fight, but it would be a quick one. It would go something like this. You go to bed at midnight and see that nothing is happened. You wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning and all you see on the news is that 45 Million are reportedly dead in Korea and that counter attacks are ongoing.

The North Koreans could get trough good volume of shells in a few hours but there is no practical way from them to get to Seoul in that time period despite the fact that it's a obvious target. Caen were a major target during operational overlord and yet , because the Germans also understood that they couldn't lose it, the allies did not manage to take it for two months . If South Korea wishes to defend Seoul , as i am confident they will, it would cost the North Koreans hundreds of thousands of casualties to encircle it and doubly so to take it. Chemical and biological weapons are fine ways to kill civilians but the military uses are as limiting to your side as it is to them; defending a bunker in NBC suit is not hard as compared to dismounting in the effort to capture one.

War these days is far faster than even it was during the Gulf Wars to the point it literally is unnerving. We are there as a deterrent only. North Korea knows we have extensive reach back capability.

Well i don't buy into all the hype/propaganda and i am familiar with many things that even uniformed people don't seem to be when it comes to these 'super' weapons. From my lay opinion it's not so much that war is 'faster' but that there is less and less hours of rest as night fighting capabilities and mobility&intelligence capacities increases. Having said that i am not a fanboy and don't buy into very many claims of smart weapons and all that. The idea that weapons flies into windows and are overwhelmingly smarter than they were during the gulf war is mostly just that and even then it was obvious that weapons were not nearly as smart or are prevalent on the battlefield as propaganda suggested. Bombs are basically still very dumb and don't often go exactly where you want them even if you had the capacity to know where exactly you want them. The war over the DMZ will in my opinion be a brutal attritional slug fest given the truly massive volumes of deeply buried stores on hand as well as the numbers of men and machines to wield them.I wont even go into how the millions of conscripts on both sides could be in action within hours, days and weeks depending on their readiness levels. In such situations there isn't 'gaps' to aim for and the concentration of forces required to make them allows enemy reserves to handily move into place. And no, tactical nukes wont in my opinion change anything for either side in terms creating breaches.

So yes, i don't expect Seoul to be occupied but given the extreme size of North Korean special forces ( of obvious dubious quality) much of South Korea might experience infrastructure sabotage.

I fear that Ki Jong-Il no longer cares. I don’t know why American’s are still in South Korea. I honestly don’t. To be honest, I think it’s a legacy thing. Sadly, it isn’t our call, it’s the President’s.

They have not done so yet so i don't see why they should now? If the North Koreans were going to exploit their oppertunities and strength the mid 70's to mid 80's were their 'chance' ( when the USSR reached at least strategic parity; supremacy in my opinion) and i don't think the large scale run down of the US armed forces in the mid and late 90's helped to recreate those circumstances.

Continued

Your comment regarding the USSR, or Communists as you called them, was rather interesting. There was a point, as Senator McCarthy can attest to, when Communism was extremely feared. Proliferation of the Communist Ideology throughout Asia was a very scary thing back then.

I think i should make it clear that they were not really communist or socialist and certainly not along the idealized lines socialist and communist expected when they vote for such representative systems. I can easily agree that 'communism' were feared but just like Iraqi's WOMD and 'the terrorist' the truth about it were very far removed from perceptions created trough a century of corporate capitalist propaganda. As we found out in the last century, well those who actually read history and don't believe what they hear in classrooms and on TV, the danger didn't come from the USSR, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba or all the other nationalist liberation movements but from the fact that the capitalist/imperialist who already controlled the world's fear that these alternative socio-economic models might catch on. As hopeless failures as many proved to be the social ideals was certainly better than those the corporate/elite classes of the world were trying to enforce at gunpoint hence the near paranoia ( Communism/socialism never had much of chance against such odds) that overtook them and the concerted efforts to undermine anything remotely resembling self determination as much as they could in each country that they didn't already had a established grip on.

We look at it today and basically shrug our shoulders and wonder what all the fuss was about, but back then, it was a very serious matter. We were in Korea because we didn’t want the “Communists” to take over all of Korea, especially with those Chinese folks eyeballing Korea so closely.

The 'communist' never did take over Korea or even North Korea as Kim was first and foremost a nationalist who were forced to take aid from whoever he could to maintain the primary purpose of keeping North Korea from being occupied by the same old imperialist. In the words of Stanley Earl, a labor adviser attached to the American aid mission in South Korea( who resigned in July) the South Korean government was "an oppressive regime" which "did very little to help the people" and that "an internal South Korean rebellion against the Rhee Government would have occurred if the forces of North Korea had not invaded". Perhaps it should also be noted that the US backed Rhee's party also lost control the Rok's then National Assembly showing just how unpopular a puppet the US had again picked. Not all together surprising given his absence during the occupation years ( he lived in the US for decades) while Kim fought in the resistance movement and had his wife murdered by the Japanese. And then people were told that it was the North Korea/the USSR that refused to allow a free&fair election.....

The aircraft carrier named Taiwan made me laugh. Thanks for that, I needed it. Once again, I think it all comes down to ideology. We keep Taiwan as Capitalistic as possible hoping that China will have it rub off on them, and it does actually appear to be working to some extent.

Well many places have been called that ( Japan, a few decades ago, Britain&Malta and Sicily during the second world war) but perhaps the best example today would be Okinawa (en.wikipedia.org...:US_Military_bases_in_Okinawa.jpg ) rather than Taiwan even thought one could perhaps count the Taiwanese and Japanese air forces as American assets in as much as they are American models.

When it comes to why South Korea and Japan feel threatened, I think it’s because of the unpredictable nature of Kim Jong-Il. He’s demonstrated the capability of nukes and they fear it’s not in order to keep them locked away in a bunker somewhere. They fear it’s for use against them.

Well US soldiers stationed in Japan have been responsible for more than a thousand Japanese deaths ( and obviously many more maimed) in the last half century with very few prosecutions due to the treaty signature that gave US personal extraterritorial right. Admittedly ( perhaps not obvious to some) these were overwhelmingly vehicular accidents but it does but paid to the idea that Americans need actual weapons to endanger the lives of foreigners or that the biggest threat to Japanese on a day to day basis were North Korean or communist&terrorist plots. More specifically one or two nuclear weapons didn't defeat Japan the last time round and if they were allowed to defend themselves they could obliterate North Korea as easily as the USA could. There never was and still isn't any defensive reason for the US involvement in Japan after the second world war any more than there is such a defense presence necessary in Germany or South Korea.

Now to turn to the Devil’s Advocate (something I particularly enjoy). If I were Kim Jong-Il and knew I was standing next to my death bed, though not necessarily in it, I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d take the next nuke I build, put it in the best ICBM I have for satellite launch. I’d put it on a course to fly over the US, I’d get that thing upwards of 200 miles above Denver and I’d detonate the thing. An EMP would flash all of the US (And parts of Mexico and Canada), effectively sending the US back to the days before electricity for at least a couple years. Sure, I’d be blown up for it, but you have to admit, from a Devil’s Advocate point of view, it does put a smile on your face.

A uninformed devil's advocate doesn't really help the devil much and in this case some more knowledge on ICBM technology as well as the size of nuclear warhead required to do create a significant continent wide effect ( no one is really sure of the effects) and the Russian would have used a dozen SS-18's with megaton range warhead loadings to come near to ensuring a continent wide blackout of all unprotected, or badly protected, electrical systems. Korea is decades away from deploying either megaton range weapons, building missiles with sufficient throw weight and miniaturizing said warheads as much as they would have to. It would be much simpler to create a few dozen dirty bombs, ala Jericho ( and yes, it will probably not be the North Koreans or external attack when it does happen) , and to smuggle them into the US for distribution In fact that's precisely what the Russians did, but not because their communist or 'evil', and are still doing to this day.

On that, long, note i will cease and desist all this typing and hope that you can find the time to disagree with as much of this as you would like to.

Stellar


[edit on 3-6-2009 by StellarX]

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