The North Korea Thread

And the only people we have to blame is ourselves.

I wanted to blame the Republican who nominated him and the Democrats who nominated Hillary Clinton and all the people who stayed home during the primaries.

Which, added together, kinda equals “us,” eh?

Umm, well ya. But not me or most of us on the forum. :)

True dat. But really, that’s the problem, isn’t it? The hard thing is accepting that we’re not the majority, even though it’s patently clear we have more of the answers than the rest of the fools. Selling that, erm, is kinda hard.

Beats the alternative.

The extra terrifying part is that if I were to pick a single person Trump is most like it would have been Kim Jong-Il, the previous leader of crazy Korea. They both have that totally absurd boasting habit.

“I’m the best at everything, nobody knows more than me about every topic topic, I’m the toughest, the most respected and amazing people love me me most (people are saying), I hold all the records at the golf course and if I played a different sport I’d hold all those records too. Every woman on every TV show flirted with me like crazy because I am irresistible. I’ve never lost a court case. My IQ is the highest. My hands and my penis are gigantic. There’s nobody who respects woman more than I do. There’s nobody better at the military than I am! Believe ME!”

Put me down for China ultimately cleaning up this North Korea garbage heap. It is their mess to clean since they are almost entirely responsible for making it.

Well, in fairness, no one has handled Korea very well, from the circumstances around the 1950-53 war, to that war’s conduct, and beyond. Had we not ignored the Chinese in 1950 and refrained from pushing to the Yalu, we would probably not have had to fight them for two years, and could probably have held on to much of what is now North Korea, leaving a buffer zone with zero chance of threatening the South. Had Vietnam not sidetracked our Asian policy so nastily for a decade–including pulling in ROK troops to fight there–it’s possible our relations with China over Korea might have developed differently, and the ROK’s occasional bellicosity might have been mitigated some. Had the USSR not given Kim Il Sung a blank check in 1950, and then used them as a loose cannon to destabilize US interests in the region, perhaps Pyongyang would have developed more restraint.

But yes, I’d agree Beijing screwed the pooch in not reining in Pyongyang long ago, and in being a bit naive about their ability to control the NKs.

Pretty much summed up here.

Here is also a good summary of their military inventory.

Specific to your underlying questions, no, it sounds like most models require some manual optical aiming or corrections leading me to believe that they do not have master command and control coordination. Regiments are independent in operation, each contains a high number of arty/rockets. Not all of these are based near the DMZ. This too leads me to believe they are not hot commanded. But, it merely takes pre-coordination to do that as an initial strike.

Also specific to your question, yes, Seoul is indeed within strike range, but only by a small amount of the firepower North Korea has. The DMZ is only 35 miles away from Seoul.

Of note from that article:

Exactly what I’ve been saying… Hell, something like half of their “artillery” is just mortars which can barely get past the DMZ at all.

NK will be able to hit other less defended areas than Seoul, but they simply lack the ability to destroy Seoul, except with a nuclear missile… which would almost certainly be shot down by the BMD systems.

Folks would die, but it’s not the total disaster that some folks here are thinking it would be. NK simply lacks the range necessary on most of its weapons.

True, but let’s keep in mind “not a total disaster” from the perspective of us in the good ole USA ain’t the same thing as “not a total disaster” from the perspective of Mr. and Mrs. Park living in South Korea within range of any of this shit. While your point is totally valid in terms of geopolitics, I’m a bit leery of going too far with it.

Having lived several times within easy range of Soviet and East German weaponry during the Cold War–remember, too, we didn’t have the advantage of today’s hindsight to realize the chances of the balloon going up were slim, back then–I am pretty sympathetic to the South Koreans. I mean, when I worked in Berlin, sure, it wasn’t terribly likely that even if there was a war that the place would be fought over like in 1945, but even a “moderate” amount of blowing stuff up would have been, um, pretty catastrophic to us poor schmucks living there.

Ya, I’m trying not to play it off like, “Nothing is gonna happen.”

In South Korea, folks will die. It will not be cool.

But I feel the need to push back against the narrative that NK can just flatten SK. Cause it can’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah, it’s bad enough without hyperbole, to be sure.

If NK uses nerve gas in Seoul-- and why wouldn’t they, if it came to that?-- even a few hundred long-range shells could kill hundreds of thousands.

The only system they have capable of actually deploying such a weapon would be the KN-09 rockets, of which they only have 100, and they aren’t all in range of Seoul. And they also have an absurdly high failure rate, based on previously witnessed tests. In general the KN-09 is designed to fire high explosive or ground penetrating rounds… it’s theoretcially possible it could carry a chemical payload, but I don’t think they’re currently set up to do so.

But I would tend to agree, that such an attack would likely be the most damaging assault they could muster.

Why can’t artillery fire chemical shells? Of course they did throughout WWI. But they don’t really need to use chemical weapons, considering that they have long range howitzers in range of the city. Counterbattery fire and cruise missiles and all that is all well and good, but Seoul will sustain severe damage with vast numbers of casualties before it takes effect. And defensive missiles are IMO incapable of providing protection against a barrage; indeed so far as I know there has never even been a proper test of such a system in the face of massed firing.

Beijing would eat a nuke.

It’ll be like, 3 or 4 World Trade Centers…tops? What’s to get upset about?

Most of NK’s howitzers do not have the range to hit Seoul.

I believe the longest range Howitzer that NK has is the M-1978, which has an absolute max range of around 37 miles, which would just hit Seoul if using rocket propelled rounds and fired from the closest point of the DMZ.