SAR Imagery Reveals Presence of Concealed Sub at North Korea’s Sinpo Naval Base | Hacker News Reader

SAR Imagery Reveals Presence of Concealed Sub at North Korea’s Sinpo Naval Base

38north.org

76 pointsinfodocket15 comments

Are algorithms used for processing these images subject to the recently announced embargo? Cool stuff.

I somehow missed that North Korea has a ballistic missile submarine. Makes a war against them even more difficult.

SAR processing algorithms are available in open world academic literature (papers and books). Though I don’t know the specifics of the system in the article to know whether that specific algorithm is subject to any sort of export restrictions.

Most implementations I’ve come across are variations of the standard textbook approaches, with modifications made for computational efficiency or a little company-specific secret sauce (think proprietary techniques) thrown in.

If you’re looking for some search terms, you might try: “polar format”, “range migration”, or “tomographic backprojection”. The first two are Fourier-transform based approaches that are relatively computationally efficient. The last, in its textbook form is O(n^3) — less efficient.

They are working on putting ballistic missiles on a sub, currently they only have road mobile ICBMs that can reach much of the USA with nukes.

You have a source for that? All the info I have seen on their missiles is them having a rough time launching them

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/28/world/asia/north-korea-mi...

Exact status is of course hard to determine, especially with open sources, but see the Hwasong-14[1] and 15. Both missiles have flown on trajectories demonstrating enough performance to reach the USA, and at least the Hwasong-14 has been displayed on a Transporter-Erector-Launcher.

(Also, I hope you remember that they've got nukes now, partly courtesy of US domestic politics counting above mitigating real world problems)

No doubt the North Koreans still have a lot left before reaching the operational capability of the Russian road mobile ICBM forces, particularly with respect to accuracy and reliability. But nuclear weapons are not that picky with aiming, and numerical redundancy is certainly within the North Korean capability.

[1] https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/hwasong-14/

> Makes a war against them even more difficult.

North Korea could be armed with sticks and stones and war against them would be just as difficult since they are backed by china explicitly and russia implicitly. If china and russia said north korea is on their own, we'd bomb them back to the stone age within a few hours. As long as north korea is back by china and russia, they are pretty much off limits.

Seoul's proximity to the border and the NK artillery based there complicates things more than you suggest: https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/how-north-korea-would...

I have a hunch that this gives the poorly trained and poorly fed NK troops with poorly maintained equipment a bit too much credit. I have a hunch this underestimates the people of Seoul.

Your hunch would be wrong. North Korea has tens of thousands of short range artillery pieces, rockets and self-propelled missiles on the border 35 miles from Seoul. They are low-tech and would very reliably reduce Seoul and millions of people to rubble within minutes of any attack on North Korea with absolutely no way to stop them. This would occur even if North Korea was somehow unable to use any of their dozens of nuclear weapons and if all of their subs, planes and ballistic missiles failed.

Off topic :

I cannot access the page, "One more step,Please complete the security check to access www.38north.org" (captcha from cloudflare it seems)

Solving the captcha didn't work for me, more captcha are presented to me.

I'm on LTE network with javascript disabled, and I'm not allowed to access the page.

This is discrimination, CAPTCHA should be illegal

EDIT : for people with same issue, this works : https://web.archive.org/web/20200104181552/https://www.38nor...

Are you VPNed or using TOR? I'm blocking JS and am not having this problem.

No ! I use data from mobile phone (so the local mobile network provider, france)

This sounds less like discrimination and more like a bug.

Where are you coming from that you think that a CAPTCHA would be used to prevent you from seeing this?

Well, may be. I'm not sure if I should trust USA after their lies about Iraq in early 00s.

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