The Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Forces have six (6) Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyers: four (4) Kongō class (essentially a licensed domestic version of the Arleigh Burke class of USN missile destroyers) and two (2) modernized Atago destroyers, each carrying the Aegis command & control system and some mix of 96 RUM-139 ASROC and RIM-66 SM-2 (Standard Missile II) Block II+ and RIM-161 SM-3 missiles in their Mk 41 Vertical Launch System cells. The SM-3 was designed specifically as a theatre defense anti-ballistic missile against SRBM and low IRBM threats with North Korea in mind. The system has performed pretty well in orchestrated tests and for a missile defense system seems to have the best demonstrated reliability (although that isn’t saying much when comparing to GMD and THAAD). The likelihood of intercept depends on the location of the Aegis vessels with regard to the threat trajectory, but I expect the JMSDF has a couple of their Aegis vessels on station to respond to such an attack at all times.
It seems that North Korean missile technology is still in its relative infancy, and it is likely that most missiles launched would self-terminate or tumble out of control, but it only takes one nuclear-armed missile making it to the Japanese Home Islands to make it a really bad day for everybody involved, even if it doesn’t make its notional target.
I imagine that the aftermath of a collapse of the DPRK would be really messy. Millions of hungry, desperate refugees crossing the borders into South Korea and China. It would take billions to bring North Korea to the economic and living standards of South Korea.
So I would hope that no one would attempt to take out this guy without thinking about the consequences.
That would require those in charge to have learned something from history. And those responsible for the US involvement in the Middle East over the past fifteen years appear to have learned nothing from earlier American involvement in Southeast Asia.
I’ve wondered - would a country like North Korea find it symbolically meaningful to have Hiroshima and Nagasaki (otherwise unimportant cities) on its nuke attack list, just for added poignance as F-you factor?
Along with, of course, places like Tokyo, Osaka, etc.
The more details they release, the less I believe them. Spies play their cards close to their chests, when they play them at all. If North Korea somehow did know what the CIA was up to, they wouldn’t want the rest of the world to know, and they really wouldn’t want the CIA to know that they knew.
They have an awful lot of old Soviet & Chinese stuff and simple derivatives thereof that’ll work just fine. As well as some new developmental bleeding edge stuff that’s still in test and fails regularly.
The former is all the volume and is what’s aimed at SK right now. The latter is all about their hoped-for future.
It is smart to assassinate a foreign leader when
A) you can control or strongly influence what happens next
AND
B) you have a very high probability of success and next to no chance of it being attributed back to you if you fail.
IMO both of these things are vanishingly unlikely to be true right now. And are known to the CIA to not be true. So it would not be a smart thing to do. And the CIA knows it.
Did somebody try to kill Kim? Maybe. Is Kim publicly blaming us? Yes. Did we do it? Almost certainly not. Is there a massive investigation and purge going on inside NK right now? Good bet.
An interesting meta-theory on all this is what if we’re actually pretty damn good at cyber-warfare? So we’re crawling all over inside their email systems, messaging systems, and decision support databases. And pretty continuously stirring the pot with “fake news” of this or that nature within the ruling circles.
In essence, really good cyber warfare would do to a government what feeding LSD to a unsuspecting person would do. Nothing is as it seems, reality isn’t real, and soon not only can’t they trust their senses, they *know *they can’t trust their senses.
For a virulently paranoid person that way lies a very, very bad trip. For a virulently paranoid government the effect would be … interesting to watch.
That smells more like a “Big Lie” to bolster the DPRK’s message, and expand on Jong-Un’s cult of personality.
Could we do it? Possibly, though I’ll note that the CIA’s track record in assassinations isn’t all that hot, and getting an asset into position would be challenging. DID we try? I seriously doubt it. Would it be a good idea? Maybe - but probably not. No one is going to miss Jong-Un much, but it’s a really bad precident, even with a whackjob* like him. DPRK is so unstable that a civil war power struggle could easily break out, and that’s something you *really *don’t want in a nuclear power, even one as limited as they.
I mean seriously - Who orders people executed by mortar shell…?! That’s some *serious *Evil Overlord shit there. Not even Dr. Evil went that far!
Reading the BBC article of the verbatim NK press release is interesting.
NK asserts that the US & SK intelligence services had recruited a fairly generic NK citizen. And were training him to recruit others. And giving him money to recruit others. And asking him to report on obvious stuff like the changing of the ceremonial guard at a monument.
With the vague future intent to somehow, sometime, and somewhere do something that would harm the NK senior leadership as a group, not Lil Kim in particular. And certainly not already.
That seems a very, very long way short of the breathless assertion that the CIA has already made an assassination attempt.
It’s also interesting that the alleged timing of most of these acts was well before the election. Apparently Obama *really *disliked Lil Kim. Who knew?!
You maybe aware of some of them CIA’s goofs but you certainly are not aware of their successes. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
North Korea commits aggressive acts, then accuses others of aggression. It menaces its neighbors while pretending it is menaced. North Koreans assassinate a perceived rival to The Great One, then NK confabulates about how the U.S. is trying to assassinate their leader.
Perhaps they actually have a Ministry of Tu Quoque.
Can anyone come up with a roster of world leaders who’ve died in office since, say, 1945? It’s probably a pretty short list. Certainly the CIA didn’t do all of them, but that roster forms the upper limit of who they (plus Mossad, KGB, FSB, and the rest of the worldwide secret alphabet soup) did do.
Side Joke: The two most dangerous jobs in the world are Star Trek anonymous red-shirt and being the current Al-Qaeda second-in-command. That Al-Qaeda guy seemed to absorb a drone strike about once a month in the late Bush and early Obama years. They seem to have gotten better at hiding; I haven’t head of that office being violently vacated recently.
The CIA helping to find him, yes. But I was sort of under the impression that the elimination part involved Obama giving the order and Special Forces carrying it out.