In March of this year the South Korean warship Cheonan was attacked and sunk along a disputed North/South maritime border, of it's 104 crew, 46 perished.
An investigation was carried out by SK, the US, the UK, Sweden, Australia and Canada and its conclusion was published last week. Having raised the warship's wreck and scoured the ocean floor around the site of its destruction they found the remains of a CHT-02D torpedo of North Korean design. Furthermore, intelligence reports indicate that two NK submarines had departed a naval base three days prior to the attack.
From this the team concluded that North Korean naval forces had been responsible for the Cheonan's destruction.
This comes at an interesting time, Kim Jong Il has recently
been to China looking for goodies to bolster his cash strapped regime. Bejing is probably the only government that can rein Kim in without the threat of war being thrown around.
South Korea has announced the following measures
in response:
* Stopping inter-Korean trade
* Banning North Korean ships from using South Korean waterways or shortcuts
* Resuming "psychological warfare"
* Referring the case to the UN Security Council
The US Navy is now sending ships to the Korean peninsula to run more joint exercises with SK, focusing on submarine detection.
So, considering that they've now actually been caught red handed having murdered nearly four dozen people, will this escalate past mere sabre rattling?
Posts
Hope not, it's the last thing the planet needs right now.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia_pacific/10150379.stm
Evidently an attempt to intimidate the North and re-emphasise whose side the US is on. China would find it real hard to side with N Korea in a full scale war, real hard.
Yeah, but North Korea is actually truly evil.
Oh yeah I can't wait for McCain to trot out the "Why aren't we bombing them yet?" line.
Sure. Which matters in terms of geopolitics... how? I mean, so is the House of Saud.
Well, did the House of Saud sink a South Korean submarine and kill 46 South Koreans? Is it actively trying to acquire nukes and testing long range ballistic missiles for their delivery?
I'm confident that the human rights abuses going on there is not helping anyone. Also the possibility that their insane leader may one day go "WHARRBARGHL" and do something overtly aggressive with his indoctrinated army.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Why is there blue smoke behind Kim Jong-Il? It looks like he farted.
There won't be a war. None of the countries surrounding North Korea want to deal with a sudden influx of poor starving war-displaced North Korean refugees.
But how many people will die if North Korea acquires nukes?
Considering it already has nukes, 0 more than will happen if it uses its nukes now?
Okay, let me rephrase that: how many people will die if they finally develop a delivery mechanism for said nukes?
Right now, NK is a ticking bomb. It's only a matter of time before it explodes. It's not even a question of whether it will.
There's a lot of innocent people in North Korea though. If China cuts off power or other resources, the NK government is going to absolutely hoard what is left. But then again, it might inspire the people to revolution? Which would be hard to do considering they're brainwashed to love their leader. It just seems super risky.
As for McCain and co, yeah, that's going to be fun.
Uh, do you genuinely believe that their leader is actually a rational actor? The country has been sitting in isolation for decades.
Wait, you think NK will nuke Seoul/Tokyo/LA in some fantasy land just for the hell of it, knowing it will turn their entire country into a glass parking lot? Kim isn't exactly rational, but he's also not suicidal (you'll note, for example, the NK army is fed).
This here is exactly the problem with the insane Bush rhetoric of geopolitics as a battle between good and evil.
He has been rational enough so far.
o_O
Sinking SK ships and openly testing long range ballistic missiles isn't exactly rational behavior, dude. What world are you living in?
Against nuclear powers it is not.
Some Soviet/Chinese border conflicts, depends what you call the Kashmir situation.
Since when did SK have nukes?
Dick waving is the number 1 way to act against super powers and other nuclear powers. It is the best method.
The question being, what can they reach?
Not SK. I'm talking about testing long range inter-continental ballistic missiles, which was done to provoke the United States.
The latest submarine sinking, on the other hand, is an act of overt aggression because they can actually get away with it without getting nuked.
Perhaps some small scale conflict between India and Pakistan but I don't know.
We have plenty of doubts. A nuke wouldn't allow them to rape South Korea anymore than their zerg rush of artillery would be able to.
Not much yet, unless we keep waiting for them to develop a long range delivery mechanism (or, in an even more nightmare-ish scenario, sell those nukes to terrorists who can then sneak them into any country they want).
Those millions of deaths you're trying to avoid seem very possible if they nuke Seoul.
Every fucking third world country that doesn't like the USA. For a recent example, see Iran. There is also Liberia.
Neither Iran nor Liberia has nukes.
They can already destroy Seoul. Atomic bombs wouldn't allow them to kill that many more people in Seoul than the 10000 pieces of artillery aimed at Seoul.
What does that have to do with provoking nuclear powers? Both countries provoked the US shitloads of time. Are you going to deny the US is a nuclear power?