North Korea’s Missile Launches Were Failing Too Often
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-mi...
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In retrospect, invading North Korea in 2003 would have been a far better choice than Iraq. NK didn't have nukes back then, we'd have avoided destabilizing the Middle East, and the defense industry would still get its blood money.
Not to mention North Korea continues to pose an actual WMD threat, they have concentration camps in dire need of liberation, their general populace is basically an ongoing humanitarian disaster, and they continue to pose an ever-increasing threat to global security.
All the US had to do was say NK was in cahoots with Al-Qaeda and had provided material support for 9/11 or something. War fever would've done the rest.
Granted, an estimated 100,000 civilian casualties from shelling in Seoul during the opening hours of the war is a hard pill to swallow. Today's threat however is the same deal plus nukes.
Then again, we had no qualms blowing away about 6500 Iraqi civilians with our surgical "shock and awe" campaign.[0] Turns out when you drop 2,000lb GBU-31s on civilian targets in the middle of a densely populated urban environment, it tends to kill a whole lot of people. Who knew! The fireworks look pretty on CNN though.[1][2]
Of course, enemy civilian lives tend to be far less valuable than allied civilian lives.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe#Casualties
1. North Korean artillery could have done far more damage than 100,000 deaths in Seoul. It's said that one out of three rounds holds a chemical charge.
2. South Korea under the progressive Roh Moo-hyun gov't was firmly opposed. Socially, South Korea would be torn apart by pro and anti-US (war) sides.
3. What about China? At that time the PRC had just joined the WTO. Instead of coming close to the advanced world, Chinese nationalists would likely have gained the upper hand domestically, and a war with the US in North Korea would even be possible.
4. Who would control North Korea afterwards? This assumes that the US would be able to occupy North Korea long enough to create order. It would have then joined South Korea, though they would have been against the war from the start? The surviving voters, that's to say the original South Koreans, and the new North Korean citizens of the republic, might well elect a strongly anti-US gov't. Esp after the US unilaterally decided to launch a bloody war.
Be careful what you wish for...
If we're playing coulda shoulda woulda, it would have been better to keep and strengthen the Clinton nuclear agreement. The Bush Administration let it break down, and North Korea got nukes.
Probably. It's just infuriating that the Western world has allowed the entire situation to persist for so long. It's 2017 and there's people who are born, live and die in labor camps with conditions straight out of the Holocaust.
>This assumes that the US would be able to occupy North Korea long enough to create order.
I often wonder what occupation of North Korea would be like. Are there actually a sizable number of brainwashed individuals that would fight to the death? Or would their populace be largely sympathetic in face of new information, considering their past treatment? My gut feeling is the latter, considering what happens when western media is smuggled into NK. These people literally risk a fate worse than death to see a glimpse of the outside world.
Either way, an occupation would be deeply weird in so many ways. I'd love to see whatever post-invasion psyops playbook the U.S. has prepared, and any associated assessments. Probably classified though.
>Be careful what you wish for...
Not wishing per se, just operating under the assumption that if we had to have a war to satisfy various monied interests and their war profiteering ambitions, North Korea would have likely been a superior choice over Iraq from a humanitarian and global security perspective.
It's usually lose/lose for whomever decides takes action. Does anyone ever get mad at Switzerland for always staying neutral, even if their neighbors are being herded away by the trainful and gassed? As soon as you get involved, you'll draw opponents even if you are doing it for The Right Reasons (which will be highly contested and you'll no doubt be accused of having ulterior motives)
If only all those who were pro-war could see innocent children operated on without anaesthetic, if they could see the true brutality of war then perhaps we would live on a more peaceful planet.
Unfortunately it is more likely to be more of the same as the war mongers can be heard quite loudly rattling their sabres ready to send the sons and daughters of others out to slaughter
I think you've misjudged a significant portion of human psychology. The torturous death of human children as a reason for peace? No! That's an injustice that demands retribution. It's a cause for war.
Just look at the Spanish civil war. The Republican faction wanted to vilify the Nationalists bring people to their side so they published pictures of children killed in Nationalist shelling.
In more recent years, Syrian rebels attempting to get the West to intervene against Assad published footage of dead children being mourned by their parents.
North Korea would collapse very quickly without China's support in fuels and food.
China currently won't accept a unified Korea under South Korean rule (which they view as a US proxy). China also doesn't want a destabilized North Korea on its border. But it is likely that many outside China and the Koreas view China's influence as a lot more than it is.
China had Kim Jong Un half-brother under their protection as a way of providing a credible threat of threatening regime change. That isn't an option anymore.
I'd note this quote from a well-sourced FT article from last year:
Beijing has often talked up its influence over its recalcitrant neighbour in its discussions with Washington, but when Pyongyang claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb this year, Beijing had no idea it was coming, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.
and this:
It may seem ludicrous to outsiders, but several close observers of North Korea told the FT that, given the choice, Mr Kim would prefer an alliance with America, the far-off superpower, than China, the ancient oppressor and emerging superpower.
https://www.ft.com/content/551bb080-1c3c-11e6-a7bc-ee846770e...
Yes, China has cooled down the relationship recently.
This sentence sounds very alien to me, am I alone? It suggests that USA had to invade something, just for the sake of invasion.
Maybe the scars of the two WW are still a little too fresh where I live (France) for me to understand such a point of view. I'm trying hard to put an adjective on that mentality, but all that comes is alien, as in inhuman.
Correct, at least with the administration at the time. Iraq was invaded on the flimsiest of pretenses, and was done in a fashion to maximize profit.
For example: Critical infrastructure was targeted under the pretense of rapid dominance largely for the purpose of creating incredibly lucrative reconstruction contracts for that administration's criminal friends. It's not like we needed to take out power and water for months.
Not to mention lucrative private security contracts, privatized logistics for the military, munitions and weapon systems. Attempts at privatizing Iraq's oil that only served to further fuel the brutal insurgency. The list goes on.
>Maybe the scars of the two WW are still a little too fresh where I live (France) for me to understand such a point of view. I'm trying hard to put an adjective on that mentality, but all that comes is alien, as in inhuman.
It is inhuman, when the motivations are profit. On the other hand, there's people suffering in North Korean camps that endure Holocaust-like conditions right now, as we speak. Liberating those people would be a moral justification for war if I've ever heard one.
You said yourself that it would be at the expense of hundreds of thousands casualties, not even counting the consequences of possible nuclear war. That's a pretty bad argument for a moral justification for an invasion, don't you think?
It's probably a worst-case estimate. It really depends on the efficacy of allied counter-battery fire and air capabilities versus enemy artillery positions.
There's also room for creativity. Park a carrier battle group off the coast of Seoul and fake a serious reactor event during a period of easterly winds, with mandatory evacuation southward in the days prior to the invasion.
>...not even counting the consequences of possible nuclear war.
If you're referring to North Korea: I'm not advocating invasion presently, merely lamenting that NK was not confronted prior to acquiring nuclear weapons. Invasion today only works with absolute assurance you can neutralize NK's nuclear capability, and that's extremely difficult if not impossible.
If you're referring to China and Russia: I'm pretty sure that to them, North Korea is squarely not worth risking nuclear confrontation with the United States over.
>That's a pretty bad argument for a moral justification for an invasion, don't you think?
No, I don't. There is an almost equal number of people languishing in hellish prison camps—some their entire lives—with a far greater amount in the general population living meager, miserable existences.
The very nature of it should transcend simple body count calculations in all but the most extreme cases of disparity. The civilized world has a moral obligation to wield its power in such a manner that doesn't allow such suffering to exist, even if doing so incurs a heavy cost.
Can you imagine if World War II had a different outcome, with Nazi Germany contained yet retaining its statehood? The term "Holocaust survivor" probably wouldn't be present in the modern lexicon. Such fiction isn't too dissimilar from the plight of North Korea's political prisoners today. By and large the civilized world doesn't give much of a shit about them.
When airmen go down behind enemy lines, the forces available to rescue them don't say "Well, we ran the numbers and it's not worth the potential cost of a rescue mission. So, we're just going to forget they exist instead." Esprit de corps ensures a moral obligation to do the right thing regardless of the risk.
I'm simply advocating for the same ideal on a basic humanitarian level.
However I will stick to thinking that NK is a problem that must be handled by SK/China/Russia/Japan. If the humanitarian crisis is really that bad in NK, then it's the role of their neighbors to see that it ends.
If said neighbors don't act, then the role of the rest of the world is to apply sufficient pressure on them.
USA is not the de facto leader of opinion you seem to be suggesting that it is (no offense intended, I just try to state my mind). It has the military/economical power, yes, but as a country it stands as equal to others. It has no legitimate mandate to solve the NK humanitarian crisis.
If you really want USA to be a benevolent dictator, then you should wish for USA to take on the third world problem (give an end to extreme poverty and uncontrolled population growth), or tackle the energy equation (seek unlimited/low-cost/co2-neutral sources).
That would be applauded and praised (but this is clearly not the path chosen right now...).
USA going into NK (deterrent/mass-destruction weapons or not) would simply repeat Vietnam, Afghanistan and Irak: a even more divided world where more and more humanitarian crisis will emerge.
After 9/11 the public found it therapeutic to have an evil enemy they could go to war against. Powerful people in the Bush administration wanted an excuse to invade Iraq again, and the public's psychological need made it very easy for them to sell the war. North Korea never would have worked because they weren't the right race and religion for the U.S. public to conflate them with the 9/11 attackers. Going to war with North Korea wouldn't have served the psychological drive to "strike back."
Yeah. Sure. With Seoul in range of NK artillery and poison gas grenades. By the way, do you know why NK still exists and will exist for a very long time? Because it has 2 boarders with superpowers, China and Russia. And both powers have zero interest that the US soldiers, stationed in SK, move close to their boarders. Invading NK looks easy on paper. But the long tail risk is enormous. Do you know why 2 Korean states exits at all? It was not the North Koreans that brought the US army to halt. But yeah, for sure this time the Russians and Chinese won't bother.
Obviously. The Chinese and Russians wouldn't engage in direct combat with the US in this day and age, though. Proxy war or no proxy war.
They would of course provide material support for any resistance, assuming there would be one. However, I suspect the North Korean populace's forced reverence for Kim Jong-Un isn't exactly on the same level as say, the Mujahideen's religious fervor.
>But yeah, for sure this time the Russians and Chinese won't bother.
Is that sarcasm? I genuinely can't tell. Direct conflict with the US is a terrible idea, and both countries know that.
The US has not enough soldiers in South Korea to face CN or RU. RU could probably take out US carriers and planes "at will" with their unmatched rocket technology. The last thing I heard was that RU jamming technology is also far ahead of the curve. And they have a nuclear arsenal to match the US. At the same time, RU has a boarder with NK while the US supply lines would be far stretched.
By the way, it was the end of the German Empire when the king decided to "kick the Serbs in the nuts"
This sounds just like the rationale for the Vietnam war or the recent annexation of Crimea.
Crimea was about strategic resources (which ultimately boil down to money), and global posturing. Barely even a pretense of an underlying moral justification beyond nationalist rhetoric.
It was more like "Wag the Dog" play. A little war to boost morale and avoid orange revolution in Russia. Cost a lot of money due to sanctions and tanking ruble, so clearly not driven by economic considerations.
"When Russia seized Crimea in March, it acquired not just the Crimean landmass but also a maritime zone more than three times its size with the rights to underwater resources potentially worth trillions of dollars."
They still had artillery pointed at Seoul, no?
No such trust exists with DPRK or Iran, which makes them dangerous.
China doesn't seem particularly worried about nuclear attack, otherwise they would be more cooperative when it comes to DPRK.
Disclaimer: I am not even close to an expert on this subject and my opinion is worth what you paid for it.
This is why the US pulled out of the ABM treaty. The distinction between their anti-aircraft systems and anti-missile systems blurred, and the US was not going to suddenly stop deploying air defense weapons. The notion that a distinction exists is archaic and reflects the practical limitations of its time but doesn't exist today for the US.
The US pulled out of the Anti-AMB treaty and followed it up by decades of increasing spending on purposefully built missile defense that has had nothing to do with air defense. SDI had nothing to do with air defense. GDB has nothing to do with air defense. THAAD has nothing to do with air defense. The only somewhat capable system which is dua use is SM3 and it's ABM capabilities are questionable at best. The US has an entire agency dedicated to missile defense https://www.mda.mil.
The US has also being playing it fast and loose with strategic launch platforms converting SSBNs to cruise missile subs without notification and planning to deploy dual use warheads on its balistic missile subs which is as ideas goes might win us all a Darwin Award.
There is no practical counter-measure over hundreds of ICBM's, sub launches, and bomber launches with many warheads per missile.
We used to talk about Stuxnet infecting Iran's underground nuclear computer systems which destabilized their centrifuges, but now we're talking about malware affecting the "left of launch" of a missile. If this is the future of stopping a potential nuclear attack from another country then is everything that used to be stable about the nuclear order now in disarray due to the "cyber age"? During the Cold War, The U.S. and the USSR knew where each other's missile were located and generally shied away from operations within the other's command and control systems for the most part.
Are we not inviting other major powers to play around in our nuclear systems? It's one thing to try and stop the North Koreans from launching a missile at California, but if the Chinese, the Russians, and the U.S. are inside each other's command and control centers, does this not undermine the mutually assured destruction doctrine? It could help make a country be so sure of its capabilities that it would be willing take a bet and never suffer any proportional retaliation.
It's not nuclear systems, but it's quite an achievement.
Like anything else in cyber security it is important to understand what is possible to defend oneself against it. Do you think the Russians and Chinese would sit idly by if we did not participate in cyber warfare? With regard to MAD any nuclear strategy has to be based on the expectation of other parties interfering with the proper operation of our arsenal. This is why the nuclear triad exists. Is this a new vector? Maybe. Is it so different from designing missiles that are fire-and forget or using launch codes in the first place?
Not really. We're just acknowledging the fact that they can and will.
I don't believe the US has the most advanced "cyberwarfare" military apparatus at this time... but that's another topic.
Today, you can buy fiber optic gyros on Alibaba. The accuracy might not be good enough for hitting a silo, but it should easily keep a rocket roughly on course. It's surprising that N. Korea doesn't have reliable full onboard guidance by now.
North Korea must have a fundamental interest in setting on the same path of growth as all its Asian neighbours; something that has happened without changing the political regime of these countries. And we in the west would clearly benifit from that and have already seen the rise of Japan, South Korea and China without military conflict.
I know the explanation is that they are "crazy" and "irrational". But those are traits of individual persons; I find it hard to believe that can apply to a whole country.
They also want the US to directly negotiate with it (NK). Whenever the US feels like negotiating with NK, it calls a meeting with South Korea, China, and Japan... bizarrely and deliberately not involving NK.
The political and military (perhaps in NK they are the same thing) leadership in NK belligerently fires missiles and pursues a nuclear weapons program because the current government in NK wants to stay in power, and this is their way of trying to preserve this. I'm not saying it'll work, but that's their line of reasoning.
The thing about economically aiding dictatorships is that there's no guarantee you're actually helping the non-'crazy' innocent folks - the dictator is in control so you might just be enriching him and lengthening the people's suffering.
Of course it doesn't.
The guarantee is that the dictator will not eat one truffle less and that the people will suffer more.
The best way to attack a dictatorship is to fund a middle class with something to lose.
So it is by no means a given that NK has a fundamental interest in better international relations, and on the other hand western governments are not immune to internal pressure. That is, if a US or western government would try to bribe NK into a strategy change, then the opposition would claim that the government "does not stand up to a bully."
What the whole Abdul Khan episode brought to light some years back was how Western agencies underestimated the technological and political skill and motivation of many so-called "third world" countries. Arguably that blind spot was caused by the deep-seated racism and cultural elitism of Western countries. There were plenty of opportunities to discover the illicit trade; we just weren't convinced they were capable of it, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Our leaders never took it seriously because their expectations were that these countries were still too backwards.
Yet another example of why we really need to face prejudice head on. We simply can't accurately assess the state of things if we're blinded by so many poor assumptions, particularly the ones girded by racist attitudes.
If American culture continues casting Asians as uncreative copycats; Muslims as radical fundamentalists; Africans as irredeemably corrupt; and South Americans as hopelessly socialist; then we're in for decades of more wild and very much unwelcome surprise.
Now, maybe the intelligence community came around much earlier. But certainly Congress was still having trouble coming to terms with the reality. Why? Because it was just so difficult to believe (and still difficult to believe) that such a repressive society could achieve such a feat.
It is, admittedly, difficult to believe for me. But I understand part of that difficulty is because Westerner's believe that such feats aren't possible without a culture of individualism that unleashes individual initiative. Maybe such a culture is superior. But it clearly isn't necessary. And that should make us question much about what we think other countries are capable of, and when they'll be capable of it.
I think that's an exaggeration. I'd note this 2013 NYTimes article[1], which notes that all US intelligence agencies agreed that North Korea tested a bomb in 2006, but were unable to come to a consensus view as to if they were capable of miniaturizing it enough to put on a missile:
an assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that it has “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the ability to shrink a nuclear weapon and fit it into a missile warhead surfaced at a Congressional hearing. That conclusion was disputed by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who issued a statement later in the day saying that it did not reflect “the consensus” of the nation’s intelligence community.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/world/asia/contrasting-vie...
194x-195x USSR wasn't a pinnacle of democracy and freedom. And technology and science back then was much less advanced than today.
But priorities are set by the elites. We rarely encounter "slam dunks" that force leaders' hands. And so our strategic direction relies heavily on the higher-ups making decisions that are still highly susceptible to bias. Heck, we elect leaders precisely because of their bias--Obama because we thought he had an inside-line on the Muslim thing, Trump because we hate Muslims. I exaggerate but it's not far from the truth.
That's why popular culture can be so critical to foreign policy. Two decades into peak globalization, there's no way to hide these things. This isn't the Cold War. Leaders can't do the smart thing while paying lip service to the electorates' prejudices. Even if we could stop all the leaks in the U.S. government, you can't hide the consequences of policy.
The CIA will of course issue the standard Glomar response (or simply remain silent) and NK will have no more or less concrete information than they had before.
Will go into more detail after Kim Fatty III gets his.
Or perhaps CIA totally fooled NY times?
such information is disclosed by several of the missile program involved personnel every time a launch fails. They disclose it after NK security service applies their enhanced interrogation techniques so that it can be reported to the Great Beloved Leader that the spies&saboteurs who caused the failure were caught, pleaded guilty and were punished.
In writing the comment I just looked up when the last US-South Korean military exercise. I was surprised to learn it started March 1st. http://www.dw.com/en/us-south-korea-launch-large-scale-milit...
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-mi...
Scuttling them at sea is nice and all --having them go up and straight back down would present the regime with quite a problem.
Neither Russia nor PRC have any interest in DPRK developing their nuclear arsenal. DPRK is resource-constrained (to say the least), and that's not just about money.