As the years go by, there is less and less desire for reunification. And it would be economic chaos for SK.
You greatly underestimate the military mania of North Korea.
How long does it take to reload a artillery/spg piece? Assume each could only fire 15 times per hour. That’s certainly a lot of incoming artillery even if it’s slightly less than 10 thousand guns. The better question is how long could they keep it up and who’s going to resupply them.
No, I don’t. I’ve read 7 books on NK. If there are 10,000 arty pieces pointing at Seoul or that region, they are going to be VERY closely packed together. That was my original point. I would think some bombing and FAE would make a quick mess of them.
Of course not before they would still get off thousands of rounds off from arty that is mostly 60 years old.
Think it’s MUCH less than 10,000 operational guns. And considering the shitty infrastructure, supply is going to be a big problem. For anything.
Not at all. Not all of the artillery is in fixed positions. Some of it is mobile, such as these. Some of (much of it) is in heavy reinforced concrete fortifications and can be wheeled out on tracks then brought back in after it fires to reload.
Yeah, much of it is old…same can be said for much of what North Korea has. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work though. Artillery is pretty simple and fairly easy to maintain, especially if you aren’t constantly firing it, which tends to wear it out. The NKs have spent decades and pretty much every dime they could on building up these systems, to the point where they spend money on the military rather than making sure their people don’t starve. Pretty much every credible source I’ve ever read concedes that if the NKs shoot first they will do a hell of a lot of damage to Seoul before there is a response. Conservative estimates I’ve read are in the 10’s of thousands of civilian dead and wounded in the first few hours. After the South Koreans and US starts getting their shit together, of course, those artillery units will be targets, but it’s going to take several hours or even a day or so to take them out…in the mean time they NKs can put a hell of a lot of shells down range and into Seoul and probably all along the DMZ fortifications. I don’t expect them to be able to push much of their old crap through the DMZ and very deeply into South Korea, but they sure would make a hell of a mess before they went down, and this leaves aside the nukes (which, to me, would probably be used when/if the South Koreans and US/allies started to push into North Korean territory).
ETA: According to this HuffPo article (grain of salt) it’s actually 13k artillery pieces (including the mobile tubes) that can hit Seoul.
See: Inmam Dam, which is still thought to have been built as a flood weapon. If it were blown, or fails (which it appears to be doing, slowly) it would have sent a wall of water roaring through Seoul. Counter-dams have been built in the last 30 years but it gives further insight into the manic hatred of NorKo for SK and the West.
Wow. I’d not read a thing about this.
Someone who led a coup might be more likely to have such a trait, but why would someone who inherited the position be more likely to have such or such psychological trait?
One thing I find interesting about the prospect of war with China or North Korea is that both of their military’s are mostly untested. When’s the last time China was involved in a major military action? I doubt they have a living person in their military that has any real war-time experience. And whatever you think about the Gulf War, or the Iraq War or Afghanistan, it has provided some war experience, like it or not.
The last time China deployed it’s military en masse was 1989…Tiananmen Square. I don’t believe the North Koreans have deployed their military in decades…they don’t even have the dubious experience of border clashes with Vietnam and India that China has. Plus, neither China nor North Korea train very well to fight…I don’t know what the ratio is for NK, but I know that the Chinese Communist Party’s military (China doesn’t actually have a national military) trains between 30-40% on communist indoctrination and propaganda, and all military personnel have to swear allegiance to the party (not the state, constitution or people). Plus, at least in China, there is no unified command structure…nothing like the Joint Chiefs of Staff or inter-agency coordination. Each branch of the Chinese military are controlled by a powerful party official…and in some cases, they are officials from different political factions, often working at cross purposes or with different goals and objectives. From what I understand the most powerful branch of the Chinese military is actually the one for their internal military (the name of which escapes me ATM)…it receives as much (or possibly more) funding as the other branches combined and is hugely powerful.
You don’t suppose being raised from birth as a god-king wouldn’t have some impact on your psyche?
You may recall that Bashar Al-Assad was an eye doctor who had little or nothing to do with his dad Hafez the King. Until Dad died and Bashar returned to Syria to take over the family business. Quite a few supposedly well-informed experts thought he was going to be a breath of fresh, modern, non-despotic air.
Things have not worked out that way over the long haul.
So what happened over the weekend? Did NK attack because of the loudspeakers and did WWIII break out between the US and China? I would have thought I would have heard something about if it had. Something tells me that China has bigger fish to fry at the moment…
North Korea went through the motions of a limited mobilization and is, IIRC, currently asking for talks while at the same time doing what they usually do wrt their media (i.e. saying they are preparing to wipe out South Korea, ready to fight the US to the death, etc etc blah blah blah). I haven’t heard of any sort of mobilization or even statement from China, so I don’t think WWIII is about the break out. Maybe next time. 
N. and S. Korea had their nuclear armageddon last night while the world yawned and obliterated each other from the face of the earth, while also rendering the region in a 5000-mile radius uninhabitable for the next 10 million years. The 50 missing submarines will return home to find . . . nothing but toxic nuclear fallout. Their secret mission, the world will soon learn, is to house a remnant of the N. Korean population (and DNA samples from all their Dear Leaders) at a safe distance for the next several centuries, and then to return to re-populate their nation, a strategy derived from watching Wall-E.
Not that this thread is specifically about this, but looks like North Korea is backing down and has apologized for the injury to those South Korean soldiers hurt in the DMZ, and in return South Korea will stop it’s loud speaker broadcasts tomorrow if North Korea honors it’s word and backs down, according to this CNN article/video.
As usually for NK:
Can someone explain to me how the Korean DMZ works? If NK isn’t suppose to plant mines in the DMZ then SK should be making a bigger stink about it, and if NK is allowed to plant mines there how did the SK soldiers run into them? Is NK suppose to tell SK where their mines are planted? Doesn’t SK have mine detecting equipment just like every other modern army does? Trying to figure out how this stuff happens…
SK did make a pretty big stink about the mines…they both protested and they started their formerly defunct program of broadcasting voice messages about NK across the DMZ. This pissed off the NKs enough that they were supposedly preparing for war.
The DMZ is a demilitarized zone (duh, I know)…so, no…NK is not supposed to be mining it. Both sides patrol the area, SK more than the NKs do because in the past the NKs have used infiltration teams going through the DMZ to raid the south. I’m sure the SKs do have mine detection equipment, but they didn’t expect the NKs to mine their patrol paths and so hadn’t equipped their soldiers for that contingency. Though, of course, the NKs regularly do things that would normally be acts of war against the SKs, including sinking one of their warships, sending assassination and kidnapping teams into the south, shelling SK islands with civilians on them, etc etc. Why do the SKs put up with it? Well, their only other choice would be war, and as noted up thread, their capital city is within artillery range of NK batteries…and this would put literally millions of SK civilians at risk. So, they put up with it…to a point. But that point seems to be rapidly narrowing ever since the NKs sunk one of their warships a few years ago. I’ve noticed a definite lowering of tolerance for the NKs acts of war since then, so I think the NKs are playing with fire doing these antics. Also, China’s support for the NKs seems to have waned a bit in that time as well, since even for a totalitarian regime such as China the shit the NKs do is over the top.
It sounds like China needs to either distance themselves from NK totally, rein in its ally/neighbor, or stand by whatever NK does. If China thinks that NK has the right to mine the DMZ they should stand up and say so, but if they don’t think they have that right they should stand next to the rest of the world in denouncing NK in an attempt to isolate them even more then they already are. If you have an unruly child on the playground who won’t play nice with everyone else (does NK have any true allies?) then it’s time to call their bluff… even if the child is threatening everyone around them with nukes. If they detonate even one nuke they must know that they will be wiped off the face of the earth forever.
You kind of have to look at this from China’s perspective though. In their region, they don’t actually have a lot of friends…we aren’t even talking allies here, we are talking about countries that are friendly towards them. They have pissed off nearly every country that they share a border with. In addition, for various propaganda and internal issues, it makes sense to continue their relationship with the north (if for nothing else they can always point to the north and say 'look at how much better you guys have it than these clowns! :eek:). Also, China is very averse to the international community looking to closely at or meddling with the internal workings of any nation, especially wrt human rights violations…that’s one of the reasons that China has blocked any sort of action by the UN in such cases in the past (in Syria, for instance). The last time China and Russia refrained from voting, in Libya, it didn’t work out well from China’s perspective. The last thing they want is for the international community to actually try and do something about the internal issues or human rights violations of a sovereign state, since that might have some uncomfortable implications concerning China itself.
But, in fact, China HAS distanced themselves somewhat from the north in recent years. They have made it clear they don’t want the north to go to war with the south, and have actually supported talks and pressure being brought to bear on the north wrt their nuclear program.
Reasonably, there is only so far that China could push the NKs, regardless. While it’s true that from the NKs perspective, China is their biggest trading partner, they have shown that they can and will push things to the point of their population starving if needs be, so China threatening the north with economic sanctions would have limited effect in the end unless China was prepared to enforce a military blockade. China has a lot of influence as far as it goes, but they can’t really dictate to the north what they will or won’t do. At least, that’s the theory.