North Korea

But, the USA can attack North Korea. What can/should THEY do?

“American and South Korean officials, while confirming the launch and expressing concern, said in their initial assessments that the missile appeared to be somewhat less capable than North Korea announced.”

“As we, along with others, have made clear: We will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea,” Tillerson said.

Some question whether there’s much more that can be done by China, which also fears that a leadership change in Pyongyang could lead to a North Korean refugee crisis or even a unified Korea that counts the United States as an ally.

http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-north-korea-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-20170704-story.html

U.S. says North Korea’s ICBM launch is ‘a new escalation of the threat to the United States’ and the world

Kim Jong Un vowed North Korea would develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the U.S.
Matt Stiles and Jonathan Kaiman Contact Reporter

Six months ago, North Korea’s dynastic leader, Kim Jong Un, announced in clear terms his nation’s resolve to develop a ballistic missile capable of reaching the continental United States.

Such an accomplishment would surely shift the power dynamic in Northeast Asia — and help cement the government’s long-sought status as a nuclear state.

It appears Kim has gotten his wish.

North Korea announced Tuesday that it had, at long last, test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile — a “glistening miracle,” as state news described it.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson condemned what he acknowledged was an ICBM test, saying the launch represents “a new escalation of the threat to the United States, our allies and partners, the region and the world.”

The news means an already intractable problem posed by Pyongyang’s advancing nuclear and missile programs just became more difficult for the United States and its regional allies.

“It’s really, really significant from a technological and political standpoint,” said Melissa Hanham, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California who studies North Korea’s missile program.

A report in North Korean state media on Wednesday said a smiling Kim, speaking to his scientists, referred to the “package of gifts” they had delivered on the U.S. Independence Day, and urged them to “frequently send big and small ‘gift packages’ to the Yankees,” according to the Associated Press.

The report said Kim “stressed that the protracted showdown with the U.S. imperialists has reached its final phase and it is the time for [North Korea] to demonstrate its mettle to the U.S., which is testing its will in defiance of its warning.”

American and South Korean officials, while confirming the launch and expressing concern, said in their initial assessments that the missile appeared to be somewhat less capable than North Korea announced.

North Korean broadcaster KRT on Wednesday aired video of a missile being launched. North Korea launched a missile on Tuesday and announced that it was an intercontinental ballistic missile. U.S. and South Korean officials later confirmed the claim.
Tillerson called upon all nations to publicly stand together against North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons — as diplomats from the United States, Japan and South Korea requested an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss the launch.

“Global action is required to stop a global threat,” Tillerson said in a statement. “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers, provides any economic or military benefits, or fails to fully implement U.N. Security Council resolutions is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime.”

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and her counterparts from Japan and South Korea called for a Security Council meeting Wednesday.

“As we, along with others, have made clear: We will never accept a nuclear-armed North Korea,” Tillerson said.

The U.S. Army and South Korea military conducted a combined missile exercise Tuesday as a show of force in response to North Korea’s test.

Multiple Hyunmoo-2 missiles, capable of striking any target in North Korea, were blasted from launchers along South Korea’s eastern coastline into the South’s territorial waters. The exercise took place within 10 miles of the demilitarized zone separating North and South.

“The deep strike precision capability enables the [South Korean]-U.S. alliance to engage the full array of time critical targets under all weather conditions,” the U.S. Army said in a statement.

The initial questions about North Korea’s claim appeared to be about the performance and range of the missile — not the fact that Pyongyang had significantly improved its capability. By any measure, the missile appeared to be the longest-range military device North Korea has tested.

The apparently successful test wasn’t a surprise for security analysts and military officials like Hanham, who were watching in the fall when North Korea suffered two mysterious and explosive missile failures at the same launch facility.

Trump suggests China should step in after North Korean missile test
North Korea has also recently released images from rocket engine tests and displayed what appeared to be several intercontinental ballistic missiles at a massive military parade in Pyongyang this spring. The government has accelerated the pace of its missile testing program in recent years under Kim, a grandson of Kim Il Sung, the nation’s late communist patriarch.

But the new capability — a clear violation of Security Council resolutions — seems to have crossed a psychological threshold. It already has led to widespread alarm that other, shorter-range ballistic missile tests this year haven’t provoked.

“Politically, it’s a game changer,” said Go Myong-hyun, a research fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

Tuesday’s test, conducted about 9:40 a.m. from Banghyon airfield near the northwestern town of Kusong, was North Korea’s 12th and most significant launch this year.

North Korean media released images of a smiling Kim, who reportedly watched the test nearby on a panel of computer monitors. Other images showed the leader surrounded by celebrating military commanders.

The device, which North Korea called the Hwasong-14, flew on a trajectory more than 1,700 miles into the atmosphere — farther than the International Space Station — for about 40 minutes. It landed more than 500 miles east, in the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea.

In theory, the missile’s range could have allowed it to reach Alaska on a flatter trajectory, though such a flight path would have introduced other technical complexities and physical hurdles for the North’s scientists.

Still, it’s a significant accomplishment for the government. “When I heard it was a 40-minute flight,” Hanham said, “my stomach just dropped.”

Newly elected South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who recently discussed North Korea at a summit with President Trump in Washington, convened an emergency security meeting. He also called on the international community to “take action.”

But for South Korea and the United States, which has 28,000 troops on the Korean peninsula, a list of bad options for slowing or stopping North Korea now appears even more limited.

Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs have perplexed the last three American presidents. They have tried negotiation, economic aid, international sanctions, diplomatic pressure and even covert action.

The strategies have failed. Experts now believe North Korea is an established nuclear state with more than a dozen devices. A key question had been whether the government could deliver its weapons globally.

Experts believe North Korea needs more time to miniaturize its warheads so that they can be launched on missiles. And scientists there still would need to figure out how to get the warheads to safely and accurately reenter the atmosphere en route to a target.

Still, the aim of long-range delivery now appears within sight despite Trump’s pre-inauguration tweet in January vowing, “It won’t happen!”

The Trump administration has announced a new policy of imposing “maximum pressure” on North Korea, calling for sanctions but also dialogue if the regime ends its program. The administration has left open the possibility of a military strike, but that could prove catastrophic.

North Korea, for example, could retaliate with its masses of conventional weapons, such as artillery, along the border that is about 40 miles from Seoul, a metropolitan area of more than 20 million residents.

Some believe the United States and other countries that have concerns about North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs should negotiate a freeze on testing and perhaps a return of international inspectors to North Korean laboratories.

With all the focus on missiles lately, it’s easy to forget that the North could perform its sixth underground nuclear detonation test any day — another provocation that would further increase the sense of crisis in the region, said John Delury, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.

“There are some diplomatic options — they’re not great — but they’re probably what we should do,” he said.

Trump had hoped that China — North Korea’s only significant trading partner — would help solve the problem. But in recent weeks his administration has grown frustrated with what it claims is a lack of pressure by Beijing on Pyongyang, concerns Trump reportedly expressed in a phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping this week.

“Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” Trump tweeted after the launch.

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North Korea has just launched another missile. Does this guy have anything better to do with his life? Hard to believe that South Korea…..
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….and Japan will put up with this much longer. Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!
10:24 PM – 3 Jul 2017

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang insisted China has already made “relentless efforts” to stem North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. And he repeated China’s usual refrain, calling for a stop to actions that violate United Nations resolutions but emphasizing a need for calm and restraint.

Some question whether there’s much more that can be done by China, which also fears that a leadership change in Pyongyang could lead to a North Korean refugee crisis or even a unified Korea that counts the United States as an ally.

“Even if you cancel most of the trade between China and North Korea, I think Kim Jong Un would still be determined to do these nuclear activities,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at People’s University in Beijing. “I think the problem from China’s perspective is quite serious. And the issue is that China still can’t find a way out of this predicament.”

China announced in February that it would ban North Korean coal imports for the rest of 2017, in line with United Nations sanctions. Yet visitors to the China-North Korea border have witnessed coal trucks crossing, casting doubt on the ban’s efficacy, and China’s trade with North Korea grew nearly 40% in the first quarter of the year, according to Chinese official figures.

North Korea announced Tuesday’s launch on state television, using a familiar news anchor seen in other major announcements, a middle-aged woman in a pink hanbok, the traditional Korean dress.

“The success of the last stage of becoming a nuclear power state is developing an intercontinental ballistic missile,” she read in a booming cadence familiar to North Korea watchers.

Her report added that the test shows the “unwithering power of our state, our strong independence and defense in the world, and will be marked as a significant mark in our history.”

The announcement came after a nearly 30-minute montage featuring soaring socialist songs and patriotic imagery, including panoramas of the Pyongyang skyline and Mt. Paektu, a volcano included in the country’s national emblem.

The montage also briefly included a soaring missile, which perhaps has now given North Korea an advantage it might retain for some time.

“At this point, it’s no longer about denuclearizing the Korean peninsula,” Hanham said. “Now it’s just about containing North Korea as best we can.”

UPDATES:

8:05 p.m.: This article has been updated with Kim Jong Un’s remarks.

5:25 p.m.: This article was updated with comments from the secretary of State, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, U.S. Army and South Korea military.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by nittany ram.

waterfield wrote:

zn wrote:

But, the USA can attack North Korea. What can/should THEY do?

The perfect definition of a “dodge”.

No, I meant it as a sincere statement. Maybe a bit too pithy and flippant the way I put it but I thought it was also clear (maybe not?). The longer version–a lot of times threats are mutually confirming illusions that can escalate. The North Koreans aren’t out to establish world domination…it’s a number of things, including the fact that it’s easier to maintain authoritarian power if you focus on an external threat. That, mixed in with the genuine if but at the same time heavily paranoid idea that they ARE under threat. It’s like that great moment in the film Thirteen Days, which is about the Cuban missile crisis. At one point, Kennedy (played by one of my favorite actors, Bruce Greenwood), reflects about how World War I started from nothing. I was thinking of moments like this, which is perfectly captured in the film.

Here’s the clip, followed by the transcript.

President Kennedy: You know, last summer I read a book, The Guns of August. I wish every man on that blockade line had read that book. It’s World War One; there’s thirteen million killed; it was all because the militaries of both alliances believed they were so highly attuned to one another’s movements and dispositions, they could predict one another’s intentions, but all their theories were based on the last war. And the world and technology had changed, and those lessons were no longer valid, but it was all they knew, so the orders went out, couldn’t be rescinded. And your man in the field, his family at home, they couldn’t even tell you the reasons why their lives were being destroyed.
[pause]
But why couldn’t they stop it? What could they have done? Here we are, fifty years later. Think if one of their ships resists the inspection, and we shoot out its rudder, and board. They shoot down one of our planes, in response, so we bomb their anti-aircraft sites in response to that, and they attack Berlin, so we invade Cuba. And they fire their missiles… And we fire ours.

PA Ram wrote:

Sleep easy.

China is giving Trump a lesson in how to handle Kim Jong-un

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/05/china-trump-kim-jong-un-north-korea-beijing

Is my missile as big as yours? I bet it goes farther and makes a bigger bang. Anything you can do I can do better. Don’t push me too far. I could lose my temper.

The fallout over North Korea’s missile test marks a return to the diplomacy of dumb. The news that its infantile leader, Kim Jong-un, had fired a long-range missile “with the possible potential to reach Alaska”, in the words of an unnamed analyst, has apparently “traumatised America”. Has it really? I thought Americans were made of tougher stuff.

It looks doubtful that a North Korean missile could carry a nuclear payload, or even survive atmospheric re-entry, in the near future. But more to the point, so what if it did? After letting off its bang, are millions of North Korean troops waiting to storm across the Bering Sea and take Sarah Palin hostage in exchange for the keys to the White House? As Islamic State has demonstrated, you can commit acts of murder and mayhem on foreign states. But without a strategic outcome, they are just acts.

The official US line on North Korea, pre-Donald Trump, was “strategic patience”, not least because its ally South Korea was happily making money next door. The policy supposedly ended with the previous “provocation” from Kim in March, when the US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, declared that: “The policy of strategic patience has ended.” After another missile launch, the vice-president, Mike Pence, added that, “Strategic patience is over.” Now Trump tweets: “does this guy have anything better to do with his life?” The sabres are blunt with futile rattling.

The trouble with issuing ultimatums around the globe is that they invite the reckless to call your bluff and make you look a fool. Each act of brazen posturing by Kim, like his father before him, has been greeted with hair-raising screeches from Washington. He now has only to put on a funny hat and stick out his tongue at Trump, and the most powerful man on Earth howls blue murder. This open invitation to Pyongyang to stage a regular taunt must be irresistible.

The last time I attended a Chatham House seminar on this part of the world, the conclusion on North Korea was one of the total impotence of the west. America could make its standard response to irritating small states and bomb North Korea to bits. But the threat is as meaningless as Kim’s threat to Alaska. What next?

America is never going to risk another Vietnam war. In addition, South Korea’s capital, Seoul, is just miles from the frontier, and North Korea’s surviving missiles, not to mention its army, could make a terrible mess of the south. So all the US can do is fire off its own pointless barrage of missile tests and call on the United Nations to tighten sanctions.

The continued appeal of economic sanctions to western diplomats is astonishing. They are wholly counter-productive: impoverishing economies, strengthening dictatorships and driving dissent underground. (The South African regime, often cited as a textbook case for the effectiveness of sanctions, was not a dictatorship and was not toppled by sanctions.) Cuba, Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Myanmar and Korea: history tells us that sanctions merely give longevity to entrenched regimes and drive oppositions into exile. They represent nothing more than virtue signalling, an attempt to make western leaders feel and sound macho. Korea’s apparently immovable regime is the prize exhibit for their ineffectiveness.

The only strategic caution being pursued towards North Korea is from China and Russia. They are like grown-ups watching two children screaming at each other in a playpen. They know that North Korea is a threat to no one but South Korea, whose new government is sensibly seeking to reduce tension. There is no way China or Russia wants a hot war in the Pacific, where each has its own power game in play. China could flick a switch on North Korea, but it need not do so yet, least of all when the country is causing Washington such evident anguish and embarrassment – at no cost to Beijing.

The diplomacy of dumb is characterised by an abuse of language. It talks of “threats to national security” when it means threats to human life and property. It calls unacceptable what it intends to accept. It declares red lines it knows it will cross. It nationalises risk, and converts it into fear, dancing to the tune of the security-industrial complex, which profits from exploiting that fear.

Dumb diplomacy fetishes distant threats – such as from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq – which require that “something must be done”, when such threats are not susceptible to anything it can constructively deliver. It imposes sanctions it cannot enforce. It is so obsessed with risk aversion, it closes New York airport to Muslims and packs Wimbledon with submachine guns. This is the sort of madness that preceded the first world war.

The most thoughtful analysis of dumb diplomacy syndrome is a new book from the president of the US Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, called A World in Disarray. In it he demands an understanding of the new power relationship between Russia, China and India. He warns against the hypocrisy of the double standard. How can nuclear non-proliferation be enforced on Iraq, Iran and North Korea when not on Pakistan or Israel?

Haass argues that we should acknowledge China’s vested interest in the South China Sea. It is China’s theatre, not America’s. Pyongyang has long been a pain in Beijing’s neck, but not too acute a pain. The strength of Chinese diplomacy is always to play the long game, not least in a part of the world where the cards are being shuffled by the day.

The truth is that the most potent weapon in Korea is Seoul’s crony-capitalist economy, to which China is becoming ever more akin. If a reduction in tension and then negotiation could unleash that economy to “aid” Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un’s generals and family would for sure rush to the trough of greed. He might not last a year. Missiles could never achieve that.

In other words, the most effective sanction on North Korea – as on almost any country – is economic, but in precisely the opposite way to “economic sanctions”. It is the sanction of prosperity. But this requires a reversal of the language of diplomacy. That may be a subtlety too far for western governments. It may not be too subtle for China.