North Korea

[Merging Cultures]

The scary thing for me is that the US are so inept. Their 'show of force' was sailing 3,500 miles away from NK.

 

Now, imagine that they make another mistake and accidentally start a conflict, with NK or another. From what I have seen, they seem wholly capable of doing that. 

[Buce]

1 hour ago, Benguin said:

Invade and liberate

 

Yeah.

 

That worked well in Iraq, didn't it?

[Merging Cultures]

13 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

Yeah.

 

That worked well in Iraq, didn't it?

That and I'd imagine most NK's are so entrenched in the propaganda that if they are liberated they wouldn't have a clue what to do. It would be a mammoth task of nation building and re-education. Personally, I'd prefer a slower process.

[lgfualol]

If I die from a nuke that fat twat from bloody North Korea launches I will be so disappointed. 

[Buce]

 

Turns out the Armada wasn't heading to NK, after all.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39638012

 

Trump lied - who'd have believed it?

[Jon the Hat]

20 hours ago, leicsmac said:

There's about 50k American citizens in SK as it happens - abour 30k military, and about 20k civilian - mostly ESL teachers. There's also a few thousand Brits over there too, almost all teachers.

 

Seoul in particular is within easy range of missilies and artillery - which is why if things did go awful the US and SK wouldn't bother to hold it beyond a purely token defence. They'd wait until the initial strike/advance was played out, and then counterattack conclusively.

Not sure where i got 10k from, thought I heard it on the radio.  As you say though, a lot of US citizens well within range.

[Jon the Hat]

1 hour ago, Merging Cultures said:

The scary thing for me is that the US are so inept. Their 'show of force' was sailing 3,500 miles away from NK.

 

Now, imagine that they make another mistake and accidentally start a conflict, with NK or another. From what I have seen, they seem wholly capable of doing that. 

The politicians talk crap, I don't think that should be confused with their unparalleled military capability.

[leicsmac]

3 hours ago, Benguin said:

Invade and liberate

Do you want a war that would make anything in the Middle East look like a fight in a kids sandpit? Not to mention the large-scale destruction of a pretty key industrialised OECD country and the millions (and it would be that many) of deaths and homeless refugees that would result, in spite of the result being inevitable?

 

Because that's how you get those things.

 

2 hours ago, m4DD0gg said:

The scary thing is this regime have nothing to loose they are that far gone. 

 

They have no chance of perfecting solid fuel ICMBs capable of delivering a WMD pay load any time soon BUT that is the ambition they are striving for above all else.

 

Once the scales tip so far China will put the smack down as they do not want to loose their biggest customer and be seen to supporting a nut job.

 

I think when the regime does collapse....and it will, we will uncover some Nazi style concentration camp shit the likes of which the world has never seen.

 

I have read some interesting books on NK where a lot of the locals truly believe the leadership are actually gods.

2

I thought it was made reasonably clear earlier in this thread that they in fact have rather a lot to lose? They have an entire country as ther private feifdom...that's what they have to lose. Asking again...why would they risk that?

 

Roughly on point with the rest of your post, though.

[leicsmac]

32 minutes ago, Buce said:

 

Turns out the Armada wasn't heading to NK, after all.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39638012

 

Trump lied - who'd have believed it?

 

 

Either he lied or simply didn't know what was going on.

 

2 hours ago, Merging Cultures said:

The scary thing for me is that the US are so inept. Their 'show of force' was sailing 3,500 miles away from NK.

 

Now, imagine that they make another mistake and accidentally start a conflict, with NK or another. From what I have seen, they seem wholly capable of doing that. 

 

 

I'm with Jon here in that the politicians are inept, but the military guys aren't necessarily (most of the time anyway). I don't think there's much of a risk of something being started accidentally.

 

1 hour ago, Merging Cultures said:

That and I'd imagine most NK's are so entrenched in the propaganda that if they are liberated they wouldn't have a clue what to do. It would be a mammoth task of nation building and re-education. Personally, I'd prefer a slower process.

 

 

Having chatted to a lot of SK folks, rapid reunification is something they want from an emotional perspective, but they also understand how much of a economic and social clusterfvck it would be. 25 million people essentially living in Orwells 1984, needing to know about what life is like outside. I'm not surprised that they don't really want to take that on, especially all at once.

 

Mind you, most NK defectors have settled in well over there, so it can be done on a slower scale.

 

21 minutes ago, Jon the Hat said:

Not sure where i got 10k from, thought I heard it on the radio.  As you say though, a lot of US citizens well within range.

Yeah, and actually that makes me more confident that things wouldn't happen. The NK's know that if foreigners start dying then the hammer comes down big time (that's why when things get tense the first thing they say is for non-Korean folks to "please leave because we don't want to hurt you and cant guarantee your safety") and as long as they're there the US coming in is even more of a certainty should things go bad.

Edited 19 April 2017 by leicsmac

[Webbo]

2 hours ago, leicsmac said:

Do you want a war that would make anything in the Middle East look like a fight in a kids sandpit? Not to mention the large-scale destruction of a pretty key industrialised OECD country and the millions (and it would be that many) of deaths and homeless refugees that would result, in spite of the result being inevitable?

 

 

I don't think we have a lot to fear from the NK army half of them are malnourished and I doubt they'll want to die for that little fat wanqua. The only worry is that they'll unleash their WMDs and take down Japan and SK with them. 

[leicsmac]

17 minutes ago, Webbo said:

I don't think we have a lot to fear from the NK army half of them are malnourished and I doubt they'll want to die for that little fat wanqua. The only worry is that they'll unleash their WMDs and take down Japan and SK with them. The only worry is that they'll unleash their WMDs and take down Japan and SK with them. 

1

That's the part that concerns me too. I've no doubt that the regular army would break in reasonably short order when their initial advance fails, but the nukes are not the only WMD that they have and the artillery they have has the potential to do a lot of damage just from the sheer amount of it.

 

It would be pretty one-sided, but I stick by what I said about the body and destruction count being much higher than anything seen recently purely because of the amount of weaponry they have that can be deployed while they're still in the mood to fight.

[Rob1742]

In a rational world, you would believe it is a war of words and everything will be fine.

 

But we are human, and humans make mistakes and that includes leaders of countries.

 

You have just to look at the US invading Iraq for no reason, with Blair joining in, because of the so called weapons of mass destruction that never existed. 

 

Look at the hundreds of thousands of lives lost when that war started, and the lives are still being lost today. 

 

So so you would think it couldn't happen, but all it takes is one person to make a bad decision, and leaders of countries are littered with making bad decisions. 

[Buce]

14 minutes ago, Rob1742 said:

In a rational world, you would believe it is a war of words and everything will be fine.

 

But we are human, and humans make mistakes and that includes leaders of countries.

 

You have just to look at the US invading Iraq for no reason, with Blair joining in, because of the so called weapons of mass destruction that never existed. 

 

Look at the hundreds of thousands of lives lost when that war started, and the lives are still being lost today. 

 

So so you would think it couldn't happen, but all it takes is one person to make a bad decision, and leaders of countries are littered with making bad decisions. 

 

This a good read, and rather disturbing:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/19/donald-trump-north-korea-armada-gaffe

 

Thanks to Donald Trump, the international community now knows that the United States is a force to be reckoned with.

Gone are the days when dictators and allies alike disdained a professorial president who preferred nuclear diplomacy to nuclear war. If only Barack Obama had played more golf at luxury resorts, his successor would not have to bring such golden luster to such a copper world.

Less than 100 days into this presidency, it is blissfully clear what kind of leader Trump is. He has made the awesome transition from a neophyte candidate into a neophyte president; from a man who bluffed and blustered his way in TV debates to a man who bluffs and blusters his way through international crises.

Here is a small-time businessman who knew nothing about foreign affairs, who has grown into a nuclear-armed president who knows nothing about foreign affairs. He used to fire B-list celebrities on TV; now he just fires off tweets and Tomahawks after watching TV.

White House all at sea over claims flotilla was heading to North Korea

US ‘armada’ said to be on its way to North Korea was in fact thousands of miles away heading in opposite direction

 

To put it mildly, it is troubling for any White House – at a time of high tensions with a rogue nuclear state – to act as dumb or duplicitous as Donald Trump. Machiavelli argued that it is better to be feared than loved. It’s also better to look like something other than a fool.

Because that’s what you look like when you misstate the mission and location of an entire aircraft carrier group: specifically, the USS Carl Vinson, a Nimitz class, nuclear-powered beast of the seas, accompanied by a strike force of two destroyers and a cruiser.

How does such confusion begin? In an epic interview with Fox Business Network, President Trump made it clear he was getting tough with North Korea. But he was also cunningly mysterious about what he was doing.

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“You never know, do you? You never know … I don’t want to talk about it,” he told his interviewer before, you know, talking about it.

“We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you. And we have the best military people on Earth. And I will say this. He is doing the wrong thing. He is doing the wrong thing.”

As an explanation of a nuclear crisis, this is right up there with his February press conference, when he spilled the secrets about his classified briefings on nuclear war with Russia: “Nuclear holocaust would be like no other.”

The only problem is that the Carl Vinson armada wasn’t sailing towards North Korea. It was sailing away from Pyongyang. A long, long way away: more than 3,500 miles away to the Indian Ocean for a joint exercise with the Australian navy.

In any kind of standoff with a rogue nuclear power, it’s helpful to avoid this kind of buffoonery. Vice-President Mike Pence traveled to the Korean peninsula to warn the North not to test Donald Trump. He declared ominously that “the era of strategic patience is over” in what was surely the most reckless formulation of words since “the axis of evil” left the lips of George W Bush.

Trump loses track of US fleet at sea

Got a minute? President said ‘armada’ headed for Korean peninsula … but ship headed in other direction … a special election in Georgia … and everything else today in US politics.

 

Now we know that the era of strategic impatience needs to wait a little longer for the aircraft carrier to sail 3,500 miles back to the hot zone. Do not test Donald Trump’s resolve or, for that matter, his naval knowledge.

The problem with this kind of chest-thumping is that it spills across the whole team of once professional adults. Defense secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser HR McMaster played their own part in leaving the impression that the aircraft carrier was steaming towards Korea. Serving a clueless boss, their reputations are growing tarnished on a daily basis, like that of the United States itself.

The nuclear standoff with North Korea has already been compared to the Cuban missile crisis. So it’s worth recalling that when JFK wanted to win over France’s General de Gaulle, he sent Dean Acheson to show him the photographic proof that was leading the world to the brink of nuclear war. De Gaulle said he had no need to see the photos because he trusted Acheson, and the United States, to tell the truth.

 

This kind of credibility is in desperately short supply in the hands of a president who explains his first military intervention in these terms, in his now infamous Fox Business interview: “I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it. And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do?”

What indeed? Like a wonderful ganache, this is a story that is so delicious it is sometimes hard to recall every crumb of detail. “So what happens is I said, ‘We’ve just launched 59 missiles heading to Iraq and I wanted you to know this.’ And he was eating his cake. And he was silent.”

If you were the Chinese president sitting opposite a nuclear-armed president who couldn’t tell Iraq from Syria, you too might remain silent and savor every bite of the last chocolate cake you might encounter on this planet.

Based on his extensive viewing of Fox News, Trump had thought the North Korean crisis would be pretty simple to fix: a bit of pressure on President Xi to cut off North Korea’s economy, and hey presto! But it turns out this whole Asian thing is a bit harder to game out, as he explained to the Wall Street Journal.

 

“After listening for 10 minutes, I realized that it’s not so easy,” he explained about trade across the North Korean border. “A lot of goods come in. But it’s not what you would think.”

This is sadly not a once-in-a-blue-moon gaffe. It is a pattern of behavior that is only understandable among teenage students who prefer to play video games rather than tackle their homework.

After all, this is how our president explained the North Korea crisis to another incisive interviewer on the wonderfully named show Fox and Friends: “I hope there’s going to be peace, but they’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time. You read Clinton’s book and he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal’ and it was a joke … You look at different things over the years with President Obama. Everybody has been outplayed. They’ve all been outplayed by this gentleman, and we’ll see what happens.”

Perhaps all North Korean leaders look alike to President Trump. But Clinton’s deal with North Korea was with the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader Kim Jong-un.

George W Bush may have lost all credibility by invading a country for non-existent weapons of mass destruction. But at least he knew which country he was invading, and which direction his ships were sailing in. He knew the difference between Saddam Hussein and King Hussein.

The world is facing a unique challenge as Trump grapples with Kim. In a standoff between two unpredictable and vainglorious nuclear-armed leaders who are obsessed with pop culture and conspiracies, the only sane course of action is clear: focus on your chocolate cake.

[the fox]

19 minutes ago, Rob1742 said:

In a rational world, you would believe it is a war of words and everything will be fine.

 

But we are human, and humans make mistakes and that includes leaders of countries.

 

You have just to look at the US invading Iraq for no reason, with Blair joining in, because of the so called weapons of mass destruction that never existed. 

 

Look at the hundreds of thousands of lives lost when that war started, and the lives are still being lost today. 

 

So so you would think it couldn't happen, but all it takes is one person to make a bad decision, and leaders of countries are littered with making bad decisions. 

?? They found what they were looking for! It's just a little technicality. You call it WMD, thy call it oil.

[Wymsey]

Apparently the CIA had failed in an attempt to kill Kim Jong-un..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39815561

 

Certainly agree with the analysis in that something doesn't add up to half believing this. Not entirely sure what they think they can get out if this that could strengthen the country's stance towards others.

 

Looking forward to Kim in meeting President Trump if ever happens (shame it can't be now, with all of this happening really).

[Jattdogg]

3 hours ago, Wymeswold fox said:

Apparently the CIA had failed in an attempt to kill Kim Jong-un..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39815561

 

Certainly agree with the analysis in that something doesn't add up to half believing this. Not entirely sure what they think they can get out if this that could strengthen the country's stance towards others.

 

Looking forward to Kim in meeting President Trump if ever happens (shame it can't be now, with all of this happening really).

I'd hazard a guess and say this guy and he dad had been targeted many times before with no luck

[ozleicester]

On 4/19/2017 at 18:00, Benguin said:

Invade and liberate

 nothing could possibli go wrong. 

 

 

 

Its all bullshit, Trump needs a distraction...

 

if you are really worried about NK or war, id suggest have a look at China, at least they have something to fear, fortunately they are just "buying" world domination rather than taking by force.

 

Seriously, its manufactured fear mongering and profiteering.

[Wymsey]

North Korea: "Whole of the US within missile range"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-40760583

 

Maybe they're clutching at straws at present, but each latest missile they spring out seems to be further and further..

Not sure how the US and the world can go about in tackling this, considering NK are a 'secretive' state and are proving dangerous already for retaliation purposes.

Edited 29 July 2017 by Wymeswold fox

[Merging Cultures]

Well, it has been nice knowing you all.

North Korea nuclear test: Hydrogen bomb 'missile-ready' - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41139445

[MC Prussian]

On 6.5.2017 at 00:26, Wymeswold fox said:

Apparently the CIA had failed in an attempt to kill Kim Jong-un..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-39815561

 

Certainly agree with the analysis in that something doesn't add up to half believing this. Not entirely sure what they think they can get out if this that could strengthen the country's stance towards others.

 

Looking forward to Kim in meeting President Trump if ever happens (shame it can't be now, with all of this happening really).

I'm pretty sure every North Korean dictator since the end of WWII has maintained a steady supply of doppelgangers.

https://japantoday.com/category/features/kuchikomi/north-koreas-kim-died-in-2003-and-was-replaced-by-lookalike-says-waseda-profesor

 

The Kims are also heavily guarded and rarely show up in public, regular North Korean TV footage usually shows them surrounded by military in a remote location.

[Guest MattP]

Standing by and just allowing this to happen could be one the worst mistakes made in humanity.

[Sharpe's Fox]

It's the People's Republic ffs not the North have some respect for the workers

[m4DD0gg]

Think its quite clear by now that with the advancements NK are making they are getting assistance from Russia and/or China.

[Merging Cultures]

Think its quite clear by now that with the advancements NK are making they are getting assistance from Russia and/or China.

Trump probably leaked the plans to them himself to be honest.

[m4DD0gg]

Just now, Merging Cultures said:

6 minutes ago, m4DD0gg said:

Think its quite clear by now that with the advancements NK are making they are getting assistance from Russia and/or China.

Trump probably leaked the plans to them himself to be honest.

 would not go that far but its pretty clear something amiss is going on. You dont go from a standard nuke to an ICMB capable H bomb in the space of a few months without some serious assistance from people who know what they are doing.