Hacker News Reader

Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone ever wonder if these missiles run their path due to glitches/malfunctions in the code rather than what's instructed by the operator? It's just hard for me to fathom why a country would intentionally fire missiles at other countries, especially when it's a battle they cannot win.

View on HN

Playing the crazy card is the only thing the NK regime has going for it strategically. Kim Jong Un wants to make sure that the prospect of regime change in NK is as unappealing as possible for the US, China, SK, and anyone else that might want to try. Part of that is demonstrating nuclear and missile capability in ways that seem reckless and dramatic. He wants policy makers to be 100% unsure of what would happen at an NK missile installation if there were a coup or invasion, and he wants them to know that the range of potential outcomes includes some really unpleasant ones.

If you ever get to go to SK, you may notice that the average citizen doesn't really fear NK. Why? Because they have been subjected to this for a long time.

Hell, in the past decade, NK has sent a threat to SK - by fax.

In other words, it's pretty reasonable to believe this is just Un trying to rile people up until someone sends them some more aid. As we haven't sent any, the behavior gets more and more outlandish. Inside the Hermit Kingdom, I'm pretty sure the leaders are well aware of the futility of actual war.

Mr. Un is just doing what his father and grandfather have done. They are basically screaming until mommy buys them some candy.

When writing Korean names, like Chinese and probably others, the last name comes first, and more often than not that holds true when they're written in English, too. So his last name is Kim and his given name is Jong-Un. Separating the two syllables of the given name makes no sense, as in "Mr. Un". Mr. Jong-Un would be more appropriate, but Mr. Kim would be even more appropriate, as in Korean you don't refer to someone as "Mr. GivenName".

Thanks. I will keep that in mind for the future, however. Mr. Kim has a nice ring to it.

Edited because I read your post more carefully.

In light of this, I've tried to eradicate the term "last name" from my vocabulary. Instead, I use "given name" and "family name".

Yes, I know that's not universal either, but it's close enough that it helps me conceptualize names when I'm writing code that must deal with them :)

You are assuming rational actors. Some of them aren't.

Also, know, that as soon as war starts with NK, they will start shelling Seoul with traditional artillery within a few minutes before we could do anything about it. I think Bannon estimated it at 10M deaths within the first 30 minutes with conventional weapons.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/north-korea-artillery_us...

Edit: Bannon casualty estimates and link.

“Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/17/16162332/bannon-american...

Some aren't, but I've not seen any leaders of nations that are not mostly rational, considering that crazy looking actions may be their best bet when factoring in game theory against more powerful entities.

Indeed. Some people think North Korea _acts_ being irrational because it is the rational thing to do.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/26/kim-jong-un-is-a-survivo...:

"While North Korea’s nuclear program is defensive, it still makes sense to remind the world about its existence and use what President Richard Nixon once described as “madman strategy,” that is, to appear to one’s opponents to be irrational, volatile, and willing to disregard costs. That’s why North Korean propaganda uses such fiercely colorful language. When North Korean TV promises to “make Seoul into a sea of fire,” or threatens to nuke Canberra, or shows Kim Jong Un in front of a map of the United States with cities marked as targets of nuclear strikes, they are delivering the same message: “we are here, we are volatile, and will stop at nothing if our opponents do something threatening.”"

Madman strategy has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory, which states Machiavelli wroet sometimes it is "a very wise thing to simulate madness"

There's a fine line between mad and truly irrational though. If your opponents truly believe that you are irrational and volatile then their most rational response should be to do anything in their power to neutralise you before you can harm them.

The best thing is to appear like you are somewhat holding it together most of the time, but when pushed - when your temper flips on - that's when the big crazy comes out. That was more how Nixon used to play it.

That's better than just full crazy all the time, which as you say, might draw a more dangerous response from your opponents.

I think relevant game theory is happening within the leader's cabinet, if the leader feels their position is under threat and things are spiraling out of control, one risky option is to create a crisis and use it as an opportunity to cull dissenters and shore up loyalists.

I have no knowledge of it, but I want to believe that since everyone, even common folk like you and I, are aware of that possibility, the militaries of South Korea and the US must have something in place to mitigate that, some sort of instant-reaction type airforce ready to take off at a second's notice to neutralize such artillery.

edit: I just read the article you linked to. I still want to believe the authors may not quite have all the information. After all, if such a way to neutralize them existed, but North Korea believed their position there untouchable, we wouldn't want to publicize our plan. Far from unprecedented.

While I appreciate the optimistic thoughts, they do have thousands of seemingly well hidden and dispersed artillery pieces. Seems like the only way to prevent an attack would be with complete destruction of the area of North Korea that's within range of Seoul.

As my mother used to say, "Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first."

Because of the proximity of the two countries, what you hope for is logistically impossible. Traditional artillery can't be intercepted in the way your describing. Unless sabotaged beforehand(which is unlikely since North Korea is an intelligence services black hole), by the time we scramble a response to take out their artillery, the damage is done. Nukes are largely out of the question as well, unless you plan to blanket South Korea and Japan in radioactive fallout.

Everyone being aware of the dangers of, say, heart disease doesn't miraculously make a cure appear.

And within the game of MAD North Korea is playing against the US and South Korea, I'm pretty sure it would be beneficial for the US to publicise the ability to neutralise the threat against Seoul. Because that threat is what gives NK the safety to continue the development of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

The only reason not to publicise such capabilities would be the possibility to, in turn, neutralise this "instant-reaction type airforce" (or whatever it may be). And I'm having a hard time coming up with any realistic scenario.

As you say, if we had it, we'd say so. But we don't, and neither does anyone else. Artillery interception isn't as hard a problem as ballistic missile defense, but it's hard enough to still be at the stage of defense contractor proof-of-concept, which is to say, it has yet to progress beyond a rigged demo that still isn't reliable.

The only thing we could conceivably do is preemptively strike NK's line of artillery that spans across the entire country north of the DMZ. They would have to simultaneously detonate without detection though and I don't know of anything that can do that. Maybe a nuclear strike delivered from boomer subs, but that would still give warning. Of course that would get China involved and that wouldn't be pretty.

Here's some info including maps of their artillery range and capability.

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would...

One of my buddies described the C-RAM system, which is designed to do this [in small quantities]. Quite a crazy sight to see at night as the rounds explode in clouds eventually. It can provide intelligence back to counter-mortar teams to strike the location of the first strike.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwZE2vcmyFU&ab_channel=Notic...

Radar counter-battery fire isn't new. A workable artillery interceptor would be, and it would be a nice thing to have! But the urgent calls for counter-battery fire with which that video ends don't inspire confidence in the system.

The best effectiveness figures I've seen cited for C-RAM range from 60 to 70 percent. Leaving aside that these are Raytheon's figures and thus extremely untrustworthy - and leaving aside, too, that Phalanx guns eat through their magazines in an awful hurry, and require much manual effort and time to reload - that still leaves three or four out of every ten shells hitting whatever they're aimed at. If they're aimed at Seoul, that's not really solving the problem.

Yeah, he said that's why they were yelling in that video to get rounds on target... The c-ram only had a few seconds of fire before 'the tray' had to be reloaded. If he was on hn I'd have him post here, his stories are pretty incredible.

Unlikely. The terrain just north of the DMZ is heavily forested hills, with an unknowable but certainly immense amount of heavily fortified artillery installations with underground access. There's no known weapon system short of strategic nukes (which are not an option because Seoul would be in range) that could neutralize that threat before mass civilian casualties had occurred in Seoul. Bannon's estimate of 20 million is perhaps exaggerated, but probably not by that much.

> Bannon's estimate of 20 million is perhaps exaggerated, but probably not by that much.

It is exaggerated by two or three orders of magnitudes from most published estimates.

For that many people to die, the entire population of Seoul ( 10 million ) plus half that of the greater metropolitan area would have to move to the northern regions of the city within range of the North's artillery and the latter would have to be 100% fatal.

Even counting the population of cities between the DMZ and Seoul only adds two million.

A second's notice is impractical - unless there's already a war underway, you'd be lucky to land strikes within a quarter hour. More likely effective would be counter-battery fire directed by radar, which we (and by extension South Korea) probably do as well as anyone in the world.

The most accurate counter-battery fire in the world can't take shells out of the air, though. Sufficiently well drilled and supplied NK gun crews would most likely be able to fire several rounds each before the first return fire arrived. And even if they weren't, at least one salvo would have to go out for the counter-battery radars to lay their guns at all, whereas the cities targeted by NK in this scenario don't move around much, and could be precisely targeted before the first fire mission commenced.

Twenty million in minutes is implausible. Twenty or thirty thousand isn't, and no preemptive option exists; to even hope to have a realistic shot at forestalling significant civilian casualties, we'd not only have to start the war nobody wants, but do it with utmost ferocity, crossing the DMZ like the Wehrmacht heading for the English Channel.

But even that wouldn't work; NK espionage assets would certainly notice the necessary concentration of force - all they'd have to do would be to watch the news stories about World War II-scale transports suddenly heading west across the Pacific from every military port on the US West Coast - and the NK regime, mad though it be, could hardly fail to draw the obvious conclusion and respond accordingly. There's no way in the modern world to achieve the kind of strategic surprise such blitzkrieg requires - not, at least, without pulling off the kind of deception that Tom Clancy wouldn't have dared write into a novel.

During the Vietnam war (or the American war, depending on your perspective) the North Vietnamese got very skilled at concealing artillery pieces, even inside caves, and then rolling them out, blasting off a few rounds, and whipping them away again.

I don't think there's currently any kind of instant-reaction force that could deal with the low tech threat of thousands of simple guns all firing simultaneously.

Well, except for nukes.

> I want to believe that since everyone, even common folk like you and I, are aware of that possibility, the militaries of South Korea and the US must have something in place to mitigate that

And NK has counter-counter-measures to those counter-measures. What about the world makes it that our side must win? History is littered - overflowing, really - with the bodies of the good guys.

I've recently read experts saying it would take over a day to eliminate the artillery. It's universally believed by such people, as far as I've read, that the damage to Seoul and its people would catastrophic.

Artillery shells travel much faster than aircraft.

Oddly enough, I first learned about this fact from a movie, Behind Enemy Lines 2 I believe, or one of the Splinter Cell games...

> Also, know, that as soon as war starts with NK, they will start shelling Seoul with traditional artillery within a few minutes before we could do anything about it. I think Bannon estimated it at 20 million deaths within a few hours.

Just to make that clear: This isn't a revelation Bannon had, at least not remotely first. That military solutions to the NK problem would involve tremendous human cost has widely been publicly reported on, often enough with well documented sources. Before the last few weeks the US govt admitted as much.

Oh I understand it wasn't Bannon's original realization. I'm sure the US realized the situation as soon as spy planes saw them putting the artillery in place. He was just the most recent person to describe the situation to the public.

IOW, the last 40+ years.

North Korea is absolutely at, or very near, a strategic position wherein attacking better-armed foes is a winning strategy. Consider:

1. NK's economy is in shambles. The regime has almost nothing to lose.

2. NK's regime does not care about human life (as evidenced by abuses against the people of NK). They would have no qualms about killing many many foreign civilians.

3. NK's populace/military would either not know about such an attack, would be convinced by state media that it was a justified attack on a military target, or would not be in a position to do anything about it.

4. Every country which NK has threatened (US, Japan, SK) is in all ways the opposite of the above: economically robust; government/military respecting of human life (of course there is room for debate there); populace respecting of human life and wary of war.

That means that any attack from NK against one of the above countries plays out as follows:

1. NK obliterates a population center. It has now demonstrated a capable threat.

2. NK makes demands (food, money, land, autonomy, whatever).

3. Victim country (say Japan) can either retaliate with precision strikes, retaliate in kind, retaliate with massive force, do nothing, or give in to demands.

3.a. Retaliating with precision strikes takes too long. NK launches another devastating attack. It is clearly not an option for the victim to lose another population center.

3.b. Retaliating in kind would be unacceptable to the government and populace of the victim country and the world at large. And if it were, it would not be worth the chance of a second attack from NK.

3.c. Retaliating with massive force (the "Trump" option) is absolutely not an option. Like the previous response, it would be completely unacceptable to the rest of the world, but most importantly, you would now be in a war with China who has to contend with a flood of refugees from a destroyed country.

3.d. Do nothing. Another city gets destroyed. NK is desperate, and there are lots of cities it can blow up until it gets its way.

3.e. Give in to demands. This is the only outcome that is all-around tenable. NK is happy, and further massive loss of human life is prevented.

NK is in an even better position if they can win their demands by merely demonstrating capability of destroying – or accidentally destroying – a city (e.g. by launching missiles over Japan), because they can repeat that trick more frequently than by actually destroying a city.

I've wondered if the best strategy might be to flood them with material goods. Just an absolute torrent of everything they could want.

Or maybe do insane things like put really nice billion dollar ships offshore and blow them up once a month.

Somehow demonstrate the asymmetry to a larger portion of the population.

I think this is quite an interesting idea, although there are probably endless reasons why it couldn't work in practice.

It reminds me of the advice to start arguing with others in your group if you're mugged, or to start singing, or anything similarly absurd.

and then they tell their population that you're giving them the material goods because they defeated you in a war, and that they blew up that ship.

Not one ship, dozens of them, month after month after month.

But that was mostly a silly suggestion, the idea is to try to think of a way to make the idea that things are better elsewhere more available to the broader population. No idea if it is possible, but I think trying to do that might be more humane than ever harsher economic sanctions.

I believe there are two mistakes in your thinking:

1. Is wrong because the decisions aren't made by the average North Korean, but by the leadership, which is living quite a comfortable life. At least more comfortable than death, or a war crimes tribunal.

3. The international community would absolutely tolerate proportional retaliation. For a nuclear attack (the only option North Korea would have against anything but Seoul), it is widely assumed that the US would retaliate with nuclear weapons. Even if some US president were to stop short of nuclear retaliation, there is no possibility of NK leadership surviving an attack.

The game theory mechanics aren't really that complicated. It's mostly the same as the cold war's Mutually Assured Destruction. Except the cold war scenarios always had the wrinkle of "if our enemy has already destroyed our country, and killed almost everybody–what is the purpose of retaliating against their population (which, by and large, would be just as innocent as ours)". NK doesn't have the ability to create destruction on such a level. Therefore, there would still be a United States (and many other countries) to protect. And such protection would be achieved by denying NK the ability to strike again, and by setting a precedent to discourage such actions by others.

I'd like to add that most (all?) of those conditions have been met for years. My presumption is Mr. Kim has run out of money for Scotch. Someone will send him some aid. He will settle down.

Yep. It hasn't gotten to the point that they've had to resort to actually destroying a city yet, or even demonstrating that they can. Just hinting that they might be able to has thus far been enough to keep the aid flowing.

If it wasn't against the law, I'd send him a few cases of Scotch.

By which I mean, I'd chip in to calm him down. I'll buy him a gently used Toyota, tomorrow, if it means he will settle down. I'm not even kidding. I'd even take him at his word. Hell, set up a PayPal account, and make it legal, and I'll send him money every month that he doesn't harass his neighbors. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Hmm... We should crowdsource Un's Scotch fund. I'm only partially kidding.

Once you pay the danegeld...

We've already paid.

They can't. They saber rattle because it means that they are powerful enough to bring people to the negotiating table but they're not actually destructive to other countries (outside tit-for-tat stuff).

The minute they destroy a real city they are game ends and the rest of the world is going to actually do something. They LOSE negotiating power and are inviting in attack against them that will destroy the regeime.

Only they have, abet in a limited way and the SK and US response was also limited to avoid escalation.

I don't think they are harmless but I also don't think they are suicidal, this just happens to be the only leverage they are willing to use.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong

I think the question is, can we retaliate against only the regime (i.e. without massive civilian population loss) before they take out Seoul? I'm mostly basing my analysis on the ability for NK to cause more damage in the time it takes for SK/Japan/US to mount a "humane" response. Of course, if there is a way, in response to an attack from NK, to take out their ability to do further damage, that is the best option.

If Seoul is their first attack, it's game over for NK. But if it's Japan or the US, they still have that ace up their sleeve unless we're prepared to destroy a LOT of NK VERY quickly.

Even if we can't take out the regime how in the world do we handle that situation? Not only are the people INCREDIBLY needy and the infrastructure a disaster but if they've have the evilness of America drilled into them since they were little children. Even if only a quarter of the population TRULY believes that… how do you handle that?

Where does the staggering amount of money needed to fix the country come from? Or would we (the world) do something like set up a new government keeps living conditions the same and just slowly improve them overtime to prevent some kind of… shock? Just to keep costs under control?

I know people have some plans but if you could just beam all the administration off the planet tomorrow would anyone be prepared for the consequences of that?

It's a population of 24 million, which is comparable to East Germany's population of 16 million at the fall of the wall and reunification.

While the situation in North Korea is certainly more dire, East Germany's economy was also largely incapable of competing and summarily shut down over the next few years, being replaced by new businesses to varying degrees of success.

NK is currently capable to feed itself under normal conditions, and to provide some basic necessities of life. Without a doubt, South Korea would have the means to provide what is missing to get to a basic, yet dignified, quality of life–especially with the certain help of the rest of the world.

I wouldn't worry too much about indoctrination. Look at Germany after WW2 and East Germany after reunification, or Russia after Glasnost, and you'll see that such top-down ideologies have limited staying power once they're no longer enforced. With the sudden availability of sandpaper and toilet paper distinct from each other, it'll be incredibly hard to continue believing in the old myths.

North Koreans probably lack the education to compete in the South's job market, but with an influx of cash, and an economy unshackled, the first years would see a boom in agriculture and construction–industries where North Koreans should be able to participate since they already exist. Some new techniques or materials appearing should increase productivity, but won't be impossible to learn for someone who has experience in those fields.

The structure of North Korea as a police state should actually work to its advantage in the first period, as well as the connections Koreans still feel for their relatives on the other side of the border. I'd be extremely surprised if there were any opposition to new leadership, or any violent or destructive trends.

The real problems will happen after a decade or two, when North Koreans have gotten used to a new standard of living, yet still lack the economic structures the make the South successful. Resentment might grow, in both directions. There'll be "stupid/lazy/obedient North Korean" jokes in the South, and impatience with the continued flow of money required to prop up the flagging economy. Meanwhile, the North will resent the arrogance of the South, start being envious of the success across the former border, and possibly start a long process of making sense of the rapid changes, their identity, and the historical injustice that randomly plunged them into darkness, while others, completely indistinguishable from them, got to enjoy their lives.

Those problems won't be insurmountable, as long as there's some leadership that doesn't budge from the necessity of the process.

I think that after the loss of a major population center, public sentiment from the rest of the world would be much more accepting of massive retaliation, especially if such retaliation was non-nuclear but still used very large scale conventional arms to effectively destroy NK.

You don't understand how it works. Every time the US homeland has been attacked the government has responded with overwhelming violence. The same principle applies regardless of who happens to be president at the time. Regardless of the consequences we can't appear weak.

But this time not only is the country already on the tip of its own disasters, it's RIGHT next door to a bunch of our allies. It's not in "the middle of nowhere" like Afghanistan.

Either way if North Korea or to do something nuclear we've never answered the question of how we respond to that other than mutually assured distraction. However I don't think we can do that without causing serious problems to South Korea, China, and probably Japan. That policy was really designed for Russia, not something like NK.

We thought messing with Afghanistan and Iraq repaired, how in the world do you try and unwind something like North Korea?

None of those other factors have any weight on the decision making process. If North Korea attacks the US homeland or military with a nuke then the US will hit back with multiple nuclear counterattacks and to hell with the consequences. Appearing weak in the face of blatant aggression would mean the end of the US as a superpower so the leadership will never allow that to happen even if it seems like the rational choice.

Homeland yes. I'm assuming they would attack somewhere in East Asia, almost certainly Japan or South Korea.

I don't consider 3.e tenable at all. Anyone playing along with that know that they will go down in history as making a worse decision than Chamberlain.

Not only will giving in to demands allow NK to do it again, if they've actually done it once we have to assume they will have done it again or that some other state will because you can get away with it.

In other words: Choosing 3.e means saying "we will allow this to happen again at least once, if not from NK then someone else". Of all the impossible choices with NK, this is the impossiblest. It will cost more lives than the other options.

Is 3.c completely unacceptable to the world? I'm not so sure. "You would now be in a war with China"? No you wouldn't. China would also react to such a thing, and having a "buffer state" is not the same thing as having a sort of ally that is in a hot war of choice with super powers.

Or to put in other words: I Turkey blew up St Petersburg in order to extort Russia, do you think the US would be unconditional allies to Turkey?

After many decades of MAD theory it's on increasingly shaky grounds because we also know that a Russia-US war has environmental impact that just may kill all of humanity even if precision aimed at the enemy.

But this ain't MAD. Destroying a population centre is killing the hostage and asking for another one.

On the "nothing to lose": Of course they do. The leaders are omnipotent beings in their own absolute dictatorship. The proles are not in good shape, but they don't get to decide whom to attack. The deciders have literally everything to lose.

In the book "The Threatening Storm" the former CIA analyst essentially says "Saddam is under the impression that if you have nukes then you can do whatever you want. That ain't how it works, son. Saddam has no understanding of the last 50 years of deterrence theory".

Now, you don't have to agree with me or Pollack, but I think it's fair to say that his interpretation of the theory of deterrence is more likely to be predictive of US kinetic foreign policy actions.

Also the US is used to counting "megadeaths", but since this again isn't MAD, it's not American megadeaths.

I don't know which other option would be best, but I wouldn't visit Soul any time soon.

Edit: This reminds me of the Moscow theatre hostage situation, where they demanded Russian military leave Chechnya. They could have as well asked for the Moon to be plucked from the heavens. If Russia had already been on their way out from their own choice, they almost would have had to go back in just as a precedence-setter. If you let your national security and military options be dictated to you, then you are not a superpower.

> Retaliating with precision strikes takes too long.

The US has airbases in the area. Precision strikes won't take nearly as long as you think.

> Retaliating with massive force (the "Trump" option) is absolutely not an option. Like the previous response, it would be completely unacceptable to the rest of the world

I don't think this is true. See the US in the middle east.

> you would now be in a war with China who has to contend with a flood of refugees from a destroyed country.

China has stated that if NK launches the first strike, it will stay neutral, so no war with China. South Korea has planned for reunification for a very long time and has an enormous fund to help deal with it so though the flood of refugees is a serious problem, it's not unresolvable.

You may be interested in the novel Fail Safe, which is about exactly this issue during the cold war. What happens when you've built extremely complex technological failsafes around your nuclear arsenal to prevent error, and suddenly they fail. How do various nations and actors respond. Very solid read.

https://www.amazon.com/Fail-Safe-Eugene-Burdick/dp/088001654...

Right, thanks for the push. Going to watch the movie now.

FYI: Both the film Fail-Safe and 'Dr Strangelove' are based on that book.

No, Dr Strangelove was based on "Red Alert".

full movie : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-Nzij8x-604

Ask Hamas. Apparently there's some logic in shooting missiles at civilians to an enemy that can and will crush you if provoked too far.

The Untold History of Palestine & Israel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUZaR3op1qw

I don't really understand what's still so untold about that story. It's on all mainstream news channels? I think kids learn it at school in most Western European countries. Hamas is a great ally for the colonists on the West Bank, it makes Palestinians look like shit over and over again.

I actually had the same thought. What if North Korea had a mishap and wasn't intending to cause an incident (or at least, not one quite this extreme)? Would they feel like they could admit it was an accident, or would they play it off as intentional even if it wasn't?

Maybe it does not in fact matter what they say.

Given that at least one nuclear strike was closely averted because of better information being available later during a misclassification of a launch of research rocket1], I think it definitely can matter.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls#19...

Sabre rattling?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com