I don’t think there’s any way to keep such an evacuation secret, even a “slow trickle” one. NK has its spies in Seoul and they would be bound to notice. Not to mention in this day and age there’s really no way to keep anything a secret that involves more than 3 people, much less millions.
NK getting wind of any sort of evacuation of Seoul would be a red flag that might tip them off that “something was coming,” prompting them to a pre-emptive type act.
If only there were defense against ICBMs.
Not to mention that the “Madman Theory” plays well into the North Korean narrative of an “imminent” attack by the US and our allies.
Out of curiosity, what is the current strategic thinking on a non-nuclear surgical decapitation strike to take out NK leadership?
Guys, I know this goes against several entrained biases here at the SDMB, but I wasn’t referring to Trump as the Madman when I made the quip. I meant Kim. Kim has been, and will continue to, threaten the West with this, that, and the other thing so long as the foreign aid keeps coming. He has performed a quite stunning portrayal as a socially awkward vicious psychopath, and now he has the first several steps towards meaningfully threatening the United States with a ICBM delivered nuclear weapon.
When the foreign aid stops, he dies. Does anyone think he’s willing to go down alone?
As to the quote,
the West was saying that about the current state of North Korean IRBM art about five years ago. Oh, they’ll never get a nuke. Oh, they’ll never get a missile that can hit anything beyond Tokyo. Oh, they’ll never miniaturize/weaponize a nuclear device to be missile deliverable. And so on.
The can has been just about kicked to the end of the street. Playground reasoning, after all.
Haven’t you, in the past here Stranger, argued eloquently about how fragile the MAD standoff between the US and Soviet Union was, and how unlikely it was that the situation did not degenerate into open conflict? If that’s the case, why would adding a nuclear armed North Korea make the East Pacific geopolitical situation anymore stable?
Wouldn’t it work about as well as other attempts during OIF and OEF to do it? That is to say, not at all? Has the US ever killed anyone with a quick sneak attack, the first time around, who was above the level of an Al-Awlaki? Even Noriega managed to play hide and seek for awhile during Just Cause.
Though killing Kim if he was actually there to watch this latest missile test may not have been a terrible idea, IF you had a way to get the military leadership to stand down.
It won’t make the situation more stable. On the other hand, a unilateral preemptive attack is guaranteed to destabilize the situation with allies in Korea and South Asia, and play directly into the hands of China. On the other hand, even if North Korea has an ostensible ICBM (and so far their efforts at even shorter range missiles have been less than impressive) and a working nuclear weapon design that can do barely more than fizzle three times out of four, it will still take them years–perhaps decades–to reduce it to the size that will fit in an reentry vehicle and survive the reentry dynamics. The United States was only able to do that after extensive testing of the W-38 in a crash program costing tens of billions of dollars. I am less concerned at this point that North Korea will have the ability, much less the volition, to attack the continental United States than I am about an volcanic eruption in the Cascade Range. North Korea is building nuclear weapons to be taken seriously, not because they have any genuine intention of trying to attack the United States.
The notion that if we just go in any nuke the hell out of North Korea it would solve the problems with the regime without creating much larger blowback is not supported by any critical analysis. Nuclear weapons make people nervous by design, and a provocation might force the regime’s hand, but like a schoolyard bully, as long as they are getting attention they don’t need to punch. And it sucks to be held hostage to a tinpot bully, but geopolitics just aren’t that simple, especially in Asia. Nobody wants the regime in North Korea–except China, and then only as a buffer and agitator–but it has remained because the consequences of direct action against the regime have outweighed any theoretical benefit of their removal. Our best course of action remains in convincing China through economical and diplomatic action to use their influence to rein in North Korea and make sure they don’t proliferate technology or materials, and await a scenario where intervention makes sense, e.g. a fall of the regime. It’s not a great solution, but we’ve been putting up with and even tacitly supporting Pakistan through essentially the same situation for going on two decades.
Stranger
As Batman said if we view the chances of a NK nuke strike as 1% we have to take that as an absolute certainty and respond appropriately.
Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
Yes, indeed, let’s take advice on nuclear stategy and geopolotics from a fictional vigilante who dresses like a flying mammal.
Stranger
:dubious:
Pakistan’s been ruled for seven decades by one semi-divine family, has no trading relationship with the rest of the world, has mass hunger, and fought a major war with a super-power a few decades ago? I must have dreamt the last few years.
Dude, you want to learn about the Geopolitical scenario in which Pakistan became a nuclear power, read a book
No, China does not want the US to preemptively attack North Korea. It makes no sense at all for them, and carries some very serious potential consequences.
A shooting war on the Korean peninsula is the greatest nightmare for almost everyone in Asia. However, China’s greatest nightmare would be a unified Korea with US troops right up to its border. It’s learned the lesson of the reunification of Germany and NATO moving east.
It supports the Kim regime because it doesn’t have any choice.
I’ve read quite a few books on the geopolitical developments of Pakistan, a nation that was taken over by a military coup in 1977 and did not return to democratic rule until 1988, and again from 1999 to 2002 by General Pervez Musharraf who was then elected to the Presidency by a 98% majority of votes in a referendum widely regarded as fraudulent and stayed in power until 2008. Pakistan is unique in all avowed nuclear weapon-possessing nations in that the nuclear arsenal is under military rather than civilian authority, and Pakistan has been implicated in the proliferation of nuclear weapon technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea, as well as other possible states. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal facilities are located in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provences (to be practically far from India), the former of which is a noted site for fundamentalist Islamic militancy. The headquarters of the Pakistani Army in Rawalpindi, outside of Islamabad, was attacked by Islamic fundamentalists in 2009, taking hostages for over a day, and another attack managed to penetrate a naval air base outside Karachi in 2011. We have relatively little information on command and control systems for the Pakistani nuclear arsenal but they are not expected to meet modern standards for control and prevention of unauthorized use using two key encryption permissive action links (PALs) and other failsafe mechanisms to inhibit function, and are also likely designed without safety features such as one-point safe trigger mechanisms and insensitive high explosives such as TATB. Pakistan is currently building up its nuclear arsenal and is projected to be the third largest nuclear power (in terms of number of weapons…I can’t find reliable metrics on total yield) early in the 2020s.
In other words, Pakistan is in pretty much every way a nation that rational people would not want to possess nuclear weapons, is building a larger arsenal than it needs for strict deterrent value, has both aircraft and missile delivery systems of demonstrated capability, and yet no one is calling for invasion or decapitating nuclear strike on Pakistan to preempt their usage.
Stranger
Agreed that it would carry serious consequences, but the fact of the matter is that the US military is not currently constituted to invade and hold North Korea, and doing so would be a foible to make our extended foray in Iraq look like a fisticuff. The end result would be a reduction in support for the US by allies in the region and an increase in stature for the PRC as the regional superpower, which is clearly its ambition. As it stands, China is quite enjoying watching the Western nations trying ineffectually to deal with North Korean nuclear weapon efforts.
Stranger
Agree overall. Ref just the bolded part. …
That’s essentially the answer for everyone: China, SK, Japan, US, UN, etc. They support or tolerate the Kim regime because it’s the least bad option on offer.
As mentioned upthread, the US *could *have chosen to start nuclear WWIII against the Soviets in the 1950s. At that time many hawkish hotheads thought any other decision was simply “kicking the can down the road” and that things would only be worse in the future. Smarter, they thought, to take all the incoming damage then and there.
We know now that that thinking was wrong. The future held other options beyond just “Soviet Union gets every more powerful and belligerent until it conquers the world or is killed in the attempt”.
There are no guarantees the current stalemate between NK and the rest of the planet will end quietly *a la *the Soviet implosion. But equally there are no guranatees it ends in a wargasm, be that local or larger. No rational actor who claims even a shred of morality would choose to trigger option 2 out of the blue.
Here is a thread from awhile ago on a closely related point. You're POTUS: Would you nuke North Korea? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board. The punchline in that thread is that once you assume that any probability of significant damage to your country is unacceptable, your own doctrine requires that you pre-emptively destroy everyone and everything. You might start with, e.g. NK, but after they’re magically erased from the planet there’ll still be some other threat someplace that’s non-zero. So they too need to be erased. Given that war, even nuclear war, is not in fact a “magic eraser”, the result is untenable.
Which proves that the premise “any probability of significant damage to your country is unacceptable” is untenable.
Also FTR, here are all the recent North Korea threads I’m aware of. Plenty of stuff to think about in there:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=825589
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=825033
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=823969
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=821804
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=812102
I think the NKs would be foolish to think that the allies aren’t aware of, and have a plan to deal with, every NK artillery emplacement
Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk
You have an uncharaticstically rudimentary knowledge on this topic. Just dealing with some of the tbings you have raised, to avoid a hijack.
Which facility in located in KPK? And you are contradicting yourself when you say that those facilities in Punjab (or the hypothetical ones in KPK) are there to be “far from India”. Firstly every major part of KPK and all of N Punjab and Islamabad region are within a few minutes flying time from Indian Air Forces bases in Indian Held Kashmir. Indeed, the largest (Kahuta) is way too close to India AF base for comfort; since it was selected by bureaucrats rather than the military (or scientists for that matter, who would never have selected it due to the large seismic activity in the region; an earthquake in 1981 led to the loss of nearly a thousand centrifuges).
You are also wrong when you say that “the program is military controlled”. In actual fact the military was mostly indifferent to the idea, the idea of a program was pushed by a few powerful civil servants, like Agha Shahi (late Foreign Minister) and Ghulam Ishaq Khan (who was Secretary Finance and then after retirement became President). The military on the other hand, from General Musa Khan (“oh we’ll just buy one when we need it”) in the 1960’s, to Tikka Khan in 1972/73 when the programme started, to Zia himself, when he was [del]running the country into the ground[/del] President, to Generals Aslam Beg and Asif Nawaz who agreed with Benazir about capping Uranium enrichment in 1989, despite near mutinous protests by the scientists in the programme.
If by little knowledge of Command and Control, you mean laid out in a statute, you would be right.
The attacks you mention, none of them were on or near any nuclear facility.
As it is, the location of actual nuclear and missile facilities is well known; since they have to be shared with India every January 1st, due to treaty..
The location of the bases are fairly well known.
Really? Rational people would want it less than
1)The Genocidal maniacs of the 1940’s and 50’s USSR
2) PRC during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
3) Apartheid RSA?
4) The Post-Soviet States?
WRT the Artillery; I have wondered. While you cannot get all artillery positions, the munitions have to be stored in one or at least a handful of logistics dumps. Won’t hitting those be effective in degrading the Norths Arty (as well as the motor pool for the trucks which will move ammo to the front) and by necessity much more feasible since the number of these dumps would be only a handful and location known or at least easier to guess.
[quote=“AK84, post:35, topic:790600”]
You have an uncharaticstically rudimentary knowledge on this topic. Just dealing with some of the tbings you have raised, to avoid a hijack.<snip>
Thanks.
Having more than one perspective on important issues is one of the strengths of the Dope. While Stranger is extraordinarily knowledgeable about many things, he, I and most of the Dope suffer from a western view of the world.
Seeing another viewpoint is very helpful.
Do artillery-killer weapons need to be penetrators? No matter how deep they’re buried, the shells have to come out somewhere. Do we have any munitions precise enough to hit those openings?
So what would the fallout be like if the artillery sites were cleared with a line of nuclear detonations? We’re talking about setting off 10-50 warheads along the artillery line, enough to get almost all of them. (so probably pretty high yield, doubt 0.3 kilotons would cut it)
The problem is that this is a first use. It has to be done all at once, by surprise, with little warning. Would make other countries in the world pretty nervous.
My understanding is that each of the heavily dug-in gun emplacements has all its ammo for the early hours or days stored locally. Typically in the same tunnel networks that hold the guns, the barracks, the electrical generators, food storage, repair shops, etc.
Nobody expects to be trucking ammo around the NK road network during the early hours or day or two of the conflict. After that things will vary; how many emplacements have been destroyed by air attack or counterbattery fire or overrun by SK troops or whatever. Or, since they’re immovable, how many find themselves on D+2 so far behind the front lines of the NK advance that they can’t reach far enough to shell the enemy.
One “lesson” of WWII was that the Maginot Line was a failure and that fixed fortifications are dumb. It’s entirely possible we’ll draw a different lesson from this set of fortifications if they’re ever put to full use. Or perhaps not. I’m not all that well-versed on the specifics.
