North Korea Declares Nuclear War. News at Eleven

View 769 Wednesday, April 03, 2013

North Korea Declares Nuclear War: News after the commercial break.

KFI Radio just announced that North Korea’s fearless leader has declared that North Korea will use nuclear weapons to defend itself. He had already declared the armistice that ended the Korean War to be void. Legally, then, the United States is in a state of Nuclear War with North Korea.

No one seems to be paying much attention. If there is any mobilization of North Korean troops, it is not visible to satellites nor any other surveillance system. South Korea continues with its military exercises, but has not called up the reserves and does not seem to be evacuating cities.

Official DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, AKA North Korea) announcements say that war will be soon.

"The moment of explosion is approaching fast. No one can say a war will break out in Korea or not and whether it will break out today or tomorrow," North Korea’s state news agency KCNA declared in its latest broadside. "The responsibility for this grave situation entirely rests with the U.S. administration and military warmongers keen to encroach upon the DPRK’s sovereignty and bring down its dignified social system with brigandish logic."

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/03/world/asia/koreas-tensions/index.html

No one seem to be taking any of this very seriously. Since DPRK has 13,000 artillery pieces positioned at the border about 35 miles from Seoul perhaps someone should. Most of them are dug into caves and well constructed bunkers, and presumably there is already prepositioned ammunition for a considerable first bombardment. They could certainly get off a first strike without much interference from US or South Korean forces. Seoul could be bombarded in minutes after fire mission orders.

How effective that bombardment would be isn’t as apparent as it might be. Cities are harder targets than most imagine; it takes a lot to flatten a city, and while North Korea has rockets that can reach Seoul, most of the artillery – and all that ammunition – would have to be moved several miles to be in effective range of the city itself.

Still, much of Seoul’s infrastructure could be knocked out within hours, and North Korea’s army is much larger than all the military forces in South Korea. If this is reminiscent of the time when the Inman Gun moved into Seoul three days after war was declared in 1950. The US 24^th Infantry division was no match for the Korean forces, nor was Task Force Smith which MacArthur hastily assembled and threw into Korea to halt the North’s advance. The US finally set up a perimeter way down in the South. This held until MacArthur landed Marines at Inchon. After that North Korea collapsed, and US forces ranged far into North Korea until stopped by Chinese intervention. Years of stalemate war along static lines followed until the war was stopped by an armistice. There has never been a peace treaty.

North Korea has also announced that it will reopen its plutonium generating reactors. They have apparently run out of plutonium, and they aren’t refining U-235 fast enough. Centrifuging Uranium hexafluoride is difficult technology, and probably more difficult if your centrifuges keep getting attacked by hackers. Saddam Hussein tried this once, but the Israelis put paid to that joke. South Korea doesn’t have all the capabilities that Israel has, but they have enough if it comes to that.

The conventional wisdom is that any attack on North Korea would result in the destruction of the city of Seoul. That of course assumes that an attack on North Korea spares their artillery. Now I don’t know how to knock out 13,000 guns in a short time, but I do know how to kill 50,000 gunners. It requires neutron weapons, but then we are now in a declared nuclear war. For more, my late friend Sam Cohen explains: http://www.amazon.com/Truth-About-Neutron-Inventor-Speaks/dp/0688016464

Of course the United States is not going to use neutron weapons in a first strike on North Korea, nor is the US going to engage in nuclear saber rattling. We are supposed to wink and shrug and then offer to negotiate and pay the North Koreans some money for their promise not to do these things, then stand by and negotiate again when they begin running their plutonium reactors and spin their centrifuges. It is Kabuki theater,k much like TSA security, and everyone knows that North Korea is only posturing in order to get some goodies. There is no possibility that they are serious. They are crazy but they can’t be that crazy. It’s not like they ever did anything like declare war on the US and then fight for years…

We can look for interesting times over there.

http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-the-day-how-north-korea-could-destroy-seoul-in-two-hours-2010-5?op=1

Danegeld

As I understand the Byzantines, they did not pay off the "Danes" to go away. They paid them to fight other "Danes." The enemy of mine enemy is a good way to get your enemy pre-occupied with someone else.

Mike

Aetius at Chalons prevented his Gothic allies from utterly destroying the Huns, because the Huns had proved useful in the past…  Of course competent empire encourages enemies to fight each other. After the fall of the Shah that was the job of Baathist Iraq…

And of course China has understood the use of proxies and silver bullets since Sun Tzu.