I hope this is the beginning of the end.
South Korea doesn’t consider latest threat “new,” its unification ministry says
Same shit, different day, new leader.
What would happen if someone held a war and nobody cared?
Proclamations from the North Korean government have relevance that is nonzero, but can only be detected by the finest instruments. I’m sure we’re monitoring military deployments and will be ready to respond to any action taken. Until that point, it’s probably best to assume that this is posturing meant for internal consumption.
That’s what I always do. Unless shots are fired/missiles launched/bombs dropped, I simply do not care about the drivel that spews from the North Korean propaganda machine.
I trust you’re not hoping for a war. I imagine there would be a large amount of counter-battery fire as well as missile strikes to limit the damage somewhat, but since they will attack first if a war starts, the NK will certainly score plenty of hits on Seoul. They have a lot of artillery and conventional rockets, after all, which may be vulnerable to attack, but which will still get to shoot first.
But unless they actually start shooting, there’s no way to distinguish their threats from the usual bombast. That’s the problem with them; they’re so stupid and crazy that there will be no way to tell if they are ever actually serious.
My guess is that they’re playing their usual game, albeit with more panache (or lunacy) this time. They’re trying to walk a fine line; they need to maintain enough of a believable threat to compel people to give in to their demands (food, other aid, toleration of their existence, at least lip-service recognition of their legitimacy) without either pushing the US and South Korea over the line into active retaliation, or pushing their own bombast past the point where they either have to pull the trigger or look weak and foolish, to the outside world but maybe even more importantly at home (though I have no idea how much their population has a chance at finding out something like that). They can even shoot up an island or sink a boat or something like that without going too far, as the consequences for really calling them out are too high to risk for that sort of provocation, but if they actually lobbed a true missile at someone I’d imagine that would take the gloves off. Likewise, they can bluster all they want and not lose face when they don’t do anything, unless they make explicit and very specific threats that don’t come off, in which case they perhaps run the risk of humiliation, which it seems is not something the regime can tolerate. It’s a dangerous dance, but one that so far they’ve proven very adept at.
Of course, it’s very hard to tell just what constitutes an unacceptable result for Pyongyang, other than of course annihilation. As unpalatable as it is, there really aren’t any good alternatives to sitting and taking their guff, or even their relatively minor outrages. The danger is really that, through miscalculation or some odd mistake, the North Koreans go one threat or one provocation too far. That would not be pleasant.
Really, the biggest weapon they have though is not their artillery and rockets pointed at Seoul, but the tens of millions of potential refugees they have pointed at the ROK and PRC. The impact of that on especially South Korea makes a bombardment of the capitol seem, not insignificant of course, but much less terrifying.
maybe someone showed him that Team America film and the section with his dad in ‘i’m so ronery’ just go to him?
Unless they were given missiles which are manned and maintained outright by China, there is no way they could hit the broad side of a barn at 3,000+ miles (Hawaii). Even without our help, South Korea would utterly annihilate North Korea. The North Korean military is run by people thousands of years old (Check out picture #10 http://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/29/world/asia/north-korea-us-threats/index.html), and many are undernourished and under-equipped. Artillery from the North would do a lot of damage, but outside of that… they’ve got nothing. Their ability to explode a nuke underground does not directly translate into a working nuke in any other fashion. Even more-so the nukes they do have are substantially weaker than the bombs we dropped on Japan in WWII.
Ironically, I think each time DPRK goes into massive posturing mode, they’ve just found out they’ve just uncovered yet another massive weakness. Maybe they found out half their artillery batteries are so unreliable they can’t be trusted. I wouldn’t put it past them to have a bunch of fake stuff like Iran’s “Stealth Fighter”. Of course, maybe the new dictator ate paint chips as a kid.
I don’t think there’s anyone in the world outside of Pyongyang who thinks they can win a war. This report describes the military situation. NK has twice as many troops, including 8,000 artillery systems, but their forces are estimated at 25% to 50% as capable as SK and US forces due to the combination of bad equipment and bad command doctrine. But all that won’t help Seoul at all if there is a war.
If the North started a war, it would be for self-destruction. Like a suicide via police shootout kind of thing. Of course if their Dear Leader thinks most Americans have the intelligence and looks of this, maybe they do think they could squeak out a win. 
Sadly, the actual “correlation of forces” has little to do with whether the situation is dangerous or not. I rather doubt that even the leadership of North Korea seriously believes they could win an all out war, if by “win” you mean defeat the South and occupy the peninsula, as they did briefly in 1950. But “winning” has a lot of different meanings. In a weird way, they might actually be counting on their weakness to keep the US and ROK from responding to their threats, while simultaneously counting on their ability to inflict severe damage on South Korea to be too much of a risk to let their enemies ignore them. Their success depends on maintaining, I think, a sort of tension between too much and too little threat, where it’s simply easier to give in than to mess around with what could become a terrible situation. Because, again, even if the USA/ROK “wins,” in a shooting war, those millions of refugees are like NK’s doomsday bomb, and probably as dangerous.
I think it’s a question of “how many Americans/SK can we kill and get away with not starting a war” is what worries me. Let’s say NK puts 20 rounds into downtown SK and kills 15 people. Worth starting a war over? How about 50 people? 100?
That’s pretty much it. They know that they can push pretty far and avoid effective retribution, because the costs are too high. The thing is to figure out what they actually want. My bet is they want to perpetuate their system, and their (the leadership’s) role and status in it, and they have zero qualms about using any methods at all to do so. That being said, the one thing they will avoid at all costs is pushing too far, and getting annihilated. But it’s a dangerous game, for all concerned.
Kaesong remains open and the DPRK scheduled a cadre meeting in Pyongyang.
They aren’t planning on war.
Unless it’s a cunning double-double. Tell the South that you’re going to war so that everyone assumes that you’re not actually going to war, and then when their guard is down - boom! You go to war just like you said you were going to!
Diabolical!
I rather suspect if they were actually intending to do something they’d not announce it days or weeks in advance, either. That doesn’t remove the real risk, which is miscalculation or accident, however. There simply isn’t any remotely positive outcome that Pyongyang could hope for from an actual war, but there seems to be a lot of mileage they can get out of constant tension and dangerous temper tantrums. So we’re kinda stuck enduring their fits and heel-kicking for the time being.
The term “accidental war” is seeing a lot of use for that reason. One miscalculation and the whole place goes up in flames. The NK got away with sinking one ship - what are the odds another incident like that will be excused given the current political climate in SK? Or how about one itchy artillery battalion commander?
Yeah, presumably everyone below the rank of general (and maybe many at that rank too) have been immersed all their lives in so much big-lie propaganda that many of them really believe their victory is certain. In that sort of environment, it’s easy to imagine some accidental or deliberate error starting the war when some artillery brigade gets the wrong orders or their commander gets a bit too excited by the daily communique saying that the enemies of the state will soon be destroyed.
The Korean War began under the auspice of a training exercise. So… stranger things have happened :)
In this case I don’t buy it. The leadership meeting in Pyongyang leaves them quite vulnerable to a decapitation strike. They wouldn’t risk it in a wartime scenario.
It’s certainly possible, they’ve severed all of the crisis hotlines and so an escalation crisis is a dangerous possibility. That said, the KPA relies on Soviet doctrine where command authority is reserved for flag officers and where individual initiative is discouraged. That makes a ‘itchy finger’ scenario much less likely.