I would think not. Most of the weight of liquid-fueled rockets is in the fuel. Here is a drawing of one of their TELs. I suspect the baseplate that the rocket is attached to rests on the ground when it’s fueled.
I don’t think the we should / could ever claim certainty on something like that, but I suspect we’d be able to identify the source of the nuclear material as North Korea with a fairly high degree of confidence, and that would probably be more than enough to get a very strong military reaction out of us if Seattle was ashes.
But how many Americans go there anyway? I doubt that’s even a factor. The United States isn’t going to telegraph its behavior with respect to North Korea, as we did in Iraq – because again, we knew that there wasn’t jack shit that Saddam Hussein could do to defend himself against an all-out assault and invasion of Iraq.
North Korea is different – like way. You keep assuming that there’s going to be some sort of massive build-up that telegraphs our possible intentions to attack North Korea. That may or may not happen, and I think there’s a good reason to believe that it won’t. The US isn’t necessarily concerned initially with occupying North Korea, providing resources to the state it has inherited and winning hearts and minds with hundreds of thousands of land troops – that’s weakling Saddam’s Iraq, not Kim Jung Un’s North Korea.
The motives for attacking North Korea are different as well. In Iraq, we wanted access to the resources. At one point it was thought that we could control regional behavior not just in Iraq but also possibly well beyond its borders (again, think about the oil and petrol dollars).
None of that exists in North Korea. The motive for de-nuking North Korea is to preserve American military and political supremacy in the region. I know, I know…we’re not an empire – oh, but we are. Just like Great Britan. Just like Rome. We just call it a hegemony or something like that. Empires are empires. They just allow countries to challenge their power without a brutal fight.
Look, it’s not just about controlling some loon with nukes – American military leaders are not seriously afraid that Kim Jung Un is going to launch a first strike. They can’t seriously believe he’d be crazy enough to launch his 1-10 missiles which might not even reenter the atmosphere against a fraction of our well-tested and highly reliably nuclear arsenal that would wipe his country off the map.
The reason the US would attack North Korea first (or bait North Korea into resembling something akin to a casus belli) is to remove a regime that could equip itself with nukes and using nuclear weapons to harass regional allies in an attempt to start dictating to the United States what it wants (i.e. removal of sanctions, economic aid, guaranteed sovereignty etc).
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea warned on Wednesday that North Korea would face stiffer sanctions if it resumed weapons tests, while crediting President Trump with helping force the North to resume dialogue and strike a broader agreement to improve Korean ties.
Kim Jung Un is playing Trump (and perhaps Moon Jae-in as well). The Olympics are a feel-good moment, a ‘photo op’ moment to humanize the inhumane North Korean regime. But don’t think for a moment that KJU is giving up his nuclear weapons program – no way in hell he does that. Not unless he gets major concessions from the United States to end sanctions unequivocally (and possibly more than that). It’s not going to happen. You have to see what the two sides ultimately want to understand where this is going. North Korea wants nukes to use as leverage; the United States would prefer that the North have no leverage. It’s a question of whether the US decides that a war is too costly to maintain its present level of power and begrudgingly accepts the ‘new normal’ with North Korea as a new member of the nuclear club, or whether the US decides to behave the way empires typically do and decides to brutalize an upstart (for self defense of course).
hmmmm. Believe the President of South Korea who deals with the situation 24/7 or someone on the internet. That’s a tough one.
I’m not sure what you think isn’t going to happen but it already happened. North Korea came to the table. South Korean President Moon Jae gave Trump credit for it.
Right, the North Koreans came to the table. And what happened after that? They get to send their athletes to South Korea’s winter Olympiad.
And what does South Korea get in return? What does the United States get in return?
Maybe South Korea’s new president gets some needed credibility in his own country as a stable leader and someone who can dial back tensions. Just getting them to talk does the trick. But he’s not going to get him to give up his nukes unless Kim gets something really substantial in return, and that something that’s really substantial would probably mean “appeasement” in the eyes of Trump and the Pentagon.
Reality doesn’t work like you seem to think it does. No idea what your Iraqi dig was supposed to demonstrate, but whether we thought there were WMD or not we had to build up troops AND logistics to invade and take and hold territory in Iraq…exactly the same thing we will have to do in North Korea, except we will need a lot more, since North Korea is a greater challenge, due to terrain and due to the humanitarian aspects we’d be encountering (like millions of starving North Koreans). It’s not something we can hide or mask…something on this order is basically on par with operations we did during WWII. You are talking about invading a major nation with advanced (if old and tottering) military capabilities and in extremely hostile terrain. It’s not a movie.
Even if you are only talking about the first stage of our Iraqi operations (i.e. the air campaign) you have to build that up. The trouble here is you have a totally Hollywood view of actual modern warfare…and this is after you’ve seen what it took to invade both Iraq and Afghanistan. THAT is how the US does something like this. Even in the air phase, it took months to position the logistics. Unless we are talking about a surgical strike to try and just take out Kimmy and his top leadership we don’t have enough there to do much of anything wrt offensive operations. And I seriously doubt that even someone as clueless as Trump is going to authorize a surgical strike with a lot of hope that things just fall in line after that. Best case is that the NK government collapses completely, no one takes charge and you have a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions with millions who are already on the edge of starvation going full Famine (along with his other 3 buddies) and no one prepared for it because, again, in the real world you have to build that sort of thing up BEFORE you strike.
And yet, even assuming you are right and we were thinking that the Iraqis REALLY didn’t have WMD (which we obviously don’t think here) we STILL built up our troop strength and logistics for literally months and did all those other things…all those things we aren’t doing here. Again, this isn’t a movie, it’s real life, and in real life, if you want to invade a country you have to do certain things…and you can’t hide that, not fully. There would be something. And there isn’t. Not yet anyway. And now would be the time we’d be seeing it happen if it was going to. Know why? It’s winter right now…winter in Korea. If the US were thinking of doing anything it would be in late spring or early summer AT THE LATEST…which means right now we’d be seeing the build-up and pre-positioning, the increased and focused training and the warning orders.
Sure…but unless we are talking about a Hollywood movie there are things you have to do in order to remove such a regime. And the US (and our allies like South Korea) aren’t doing any of those. What we are doing in more akin to a show of force and defensive preparations in case NK does something stupid. The only caveat I’ll give is that Trump IS pretty stupid and clueless, especially about all things military, and he watches movies and mainly devoid of reality talk news shows, so he might think that we could just invade any time with what we have, or that we could just do a surgical strike with what we have on hand (and not worry about what we’d have to do for the next 6 months while we ship supplies over to do more)…and even though his advisors should and probably do know better, I suppose he could always over ride them. But from what I’m seeing and where I’m sitting the US is not in a stance to attack North Korea in a serious way, more in a stance to respond to any attack with a really big hammer.
My goodness to you have any idea what you’re advocating? The NK army has approximately 900,000 personnel. The SK military has about 495,000. The US has about . . . 23,000 in Korea. Conventional wisdom during the cold war was that for (non-nuclear) battles, the attacker needs a 3:1 advantage in attackers. During the Gulf war, while the allies didn’t have that advantage, they did have clear and overwhelming air superiority, and the attackers had been preparing for the invasion in theater for months. There is no way that the 23,000 Americans manning the line in Korea can in a moments notice begin offensive operations against NK. I know you’re convinced that the Pentagon is just comping at the bit to invade, but this is ludicrous.
[QUOTE=asahi;20726196
The motives for attacking North Korea are different as well. In Iraq, we wanted access to the resources…
.
None of that exists in North Korea. The motive for de-nuking North Korea is to preserve American military and political supremacy in the region. …
Look, it’s not just about controlling some loon with nukes – American military leaders are not seriously afraid that Kim Jung Un is going to launch a first strike. They can’t seriously believe he’d be crazy enough to launch his 1-10 missiles which might not even reenter the atmosphere against a fraction of our well-tested and highly reliably nuclear arsenal that would wipe his country off the map.
The reason the US would attack North Korea first (or bait North Korea into resembling something akin to a casus belli) is to remove a regime that could equip itself with nukes and using nuclear weapons to harass regional allies in an attempt to start dictating to the United States what it wants (i.e. removal of sanctions, economic aid, guaranteed sovereignty etc).[/QUOTE]
You knoiw, everyone said that war was for oil, but it turned out not to be.
No, the reason is to stop a madman from nuking the uSA or it’s allies.
Yes, Kim is crazy enough to do that. He may well figure he could survive in soem bunker, and he cares nothing for his people.
I quoted what actually happened. The SK president praised trump. What immediately followed in the article was personal commentary with no basis in fact. The rest of the article talked about public opinion. unrelated to Choe San-Hun’s quote.
You on the other hand quoted nothing and added nothing except a drive by insult directed at me. If you have something to say don’t be shy.
No, not the entire Pentagon - there are intelligent ones who rightly see this as a disaster and want us to learn how to live with a world in which we have a little less power. But there are those who refuse to accept this reality and who insist that America must be the dominant global power in East Asia. You can’t be the dominant global power in East Asia if you on one hand claim to be the protector of Japan and South Korea and yet allow North Korea to harass its neighbors with a nuclear weapons program as a backstop. When does it stop? When does North Korea stop firing missiles that land just off the coast of Japan?
The North Koreans want to use their nukes to achieve something – that’s what you may or may not be understanding here. But what you’re absolutely not understanding is that this something that North Korea wants to achieve is going to royally challenge American regional supremacy. I don’t mean that North Korea suddenly becomes a military or political equal to the United States, but the North Koreans want the ability, like China and other countries, to claim credibly that they can inflict pain on the United States if its regime is attacked or even seriously undermined.
Saying that you’re selectively quoting an article isn’t actually an insult at all. It’s a criticism of your debate tactic of quoting what fits into your political narrative and discarding what does not.
That’s what I have to say, and I think it’s the third time I said it.
Do you really think a little thing like millions of starving casualties is going to stay the military’s hand? It certainly isn’t stopping us from supporting the Saudi carpet-bombing and siege-warfare blockade in Yemen. Ideology and economics trump humanitarian concerns every time, sadly.
