A New Korean War Would Be Devastating

**jasmine** · 12-16-2010, 06:48 AM

http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12/15/a-...-could-happen/

A New Korean War Would Be Devastating, but It Could Happen

(Dec. 15) -- There would be no winner if war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.

But more than 57 years after the armistice suspended open hostilities between the U.S.-allied Republic of Korea in the south and the Chinese-backed Democratic People's Republic in the north, their border remains trip-wire tense. And both sides are braced for a return to conflict, however unlikely, that would kill millions of people and resonate economically and politically across the globe.

In the South Korean capital of Seoul today, residents participated in a 20-minute air attack drill by donning gas masks and rushing into underground shelters. It was the biggest evacuation exercise in decades and one treated with an unusual seriousness in the wake of last month's artillery clash.

KCNA / AFP / Getty Images
This photo released from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on April 26 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, center, inspecting at undisclosed location in North Korea.

Two South Korean marines and two civilians were killed when North Korea opened fire on the small garrison island of Yeonpyeong last month. The attack, which brought a brief South Korean artillery response, came just after the North unveiled hidden, potentially dangerous advances in its nuclear program, and a few months after a South Korean naval vessel was sunk by what appeared to be a North Korean torpedo.

North Korea's rhetoric has become exaggeratingly bellicose -- a standard practice for Pyongyang -- with the state-run Korean Central News Agency most recently saying joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises in the Yellow Sea brought "the dark clouds of a nuclear war to hang over the Korean peninsula."

And these days, the international community isn't dismissing the threat.

An apparently evolving transfer of power in North Korea, along with the country's perpetual economic frailty and extreme paranoia, has put the U.S. and South Korea on edge and scrambling for ways to calm the situation.

"It's changed out there, and it's dangerous. Increasingly dangerous," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told troops in Baghdad this week when asked about the Korean standoff.

In addition to what's thought to be a rudimentary nuclear arsenal of perhaps a dozen bombs, the North Koreans have a million-man army, with half deployed near the demilitarized zone abutting South Korea, and hundreds of long-range artillery tubes within range of Seoul. That means a sudden strike could potentially kill the roughly 30,000 American civilians living among the millions of South Koreans, as well as the roughly 25,000 U.S. servicemen and women assigned to protect South Korea.

In turn, U.S. and South Korean firepower can destroy the North Korean leadership and military.

"North and South Korea have never been closer to war since 1953, but close is actually not too close because of the terrible consequences of war for both sides," as the national security veteran analyst Leslie Gelb put it recently.

Still, unpredictability is one of North Korea's most dominant characteristics, and the fields of potentially deadly miscommunication or misinterpretation are many.

Out-of-Control Scenarios

After the sinking of the Cheonan in March and South Korea's angry accusations against the North, Pyongyang shut down a military-to-military hot line that had been set up in 2004 for the two sides to handle maritime emergencies.

It also periodically turns off the United Nations fax machine link at Panmunjon, along the DMZ, like a small child acting out.

Ahn Young-joon, AP
North Korean Army soldiers, background, look at the southern side as South Korean Army soldiers stand guard at the border village of Panmunjom in the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, on Oct. 20.

**Advertisement** · 12-16-2010 06:48 AM

**jasmine** · 12-16-2010, 06:48 AM

"The potential for miscalculation, misunderstanding, and unintended escalation cannot be dismissed," military scholar and analyst Paul Stares wrote in a war contingency document put out by the Council on Foreign Relations last month, before the artillery clash. "Indeed, a combination of factors could propel a crisis beyond what the principal protagonists might initially expect or desire."

North Korea's own insular and despotic regime -- built around a cult of personality toward leader Kim Jong Il -- could get in the way of understanding any external threat and internal weaknesses.

After Saddam Hussein was deposed, plenty of evidence emerged that he didn't know the limits of Iraq's defenses because frightened subordinates were afraid to tell him.

"Pyongyang's grasp of potentially fast-moving events could be quite limited and slow, given the North's relatively unsophisticated intelligence and communication systems," Stares said. "Furthermore, the limited options for communicating with the North Korean leadership could hinder attempts to bring a rapidly deteriorating situation under control."

Equally destabilizing is the North's current, apparently volatile succession process.

The ailing Kim Jong Il has tapped his third son, the young and inexperienced Kim Jong Un, to be the next leader, as evidenced by the younger Kim's recent promotion to four-star general and what appears to be the establishment of Kim family members and allies in a de facto ruling council that will advise him.

Kim Jong Un may be behind the recent and possibly future acts of aggression as a way of establishing his credibility with the military, just as his father was believed to have done when -- after a playboy-like youth -- he was preparing to succeed his father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung.

But North Korean politics are extremely hard to decipher from afar, and it's possible that factions within the government or military could oppose Kim Jong Un, creating the potential for even more volatility.

Pyongyang also has a history of using aggression to get the world's attention in order to get food, fuel or other aid through negotiations. And though it has mastered the art of brinkmanship, the North always runs the risk of overplaying its hand.

Operations Plan 5027

The North Koreans do know there is no way they could come out ahead in full-out war, but they also know they could inflict a tremendous amount of damage before the U.S. and South Korea could stop them.

In some ways, the thrust of each side's military threat is the unbearable cost to either of a first strike. If North Korea attacks the South with the decades-old motive of forcing reunification, U.S. and South Korean air and sea power can obliterate all key military targets, invade and topple the regime. In the unlikely event of the South and U.S. forces instigating a conflict, the North can destroy Seoul, send missiles toward Japan and attack with a missile or airplane-carried nuclear device.

The U.S. military perpetually updates its contingency plans for war in Korea, a document known as Operations Plan 5027, or simply OPLAN 5027.

It officially envisions the U.S. providing units to reinforce South Korean in the event of an attack, but the commander of joint forces would be an American.

As parsed by the security documentation compiler GlobalSecurity.org, OPLAN 5027 lays out some scary possibilities.

The roughly 500 artillery tubes trained on Seoul, twice the firepower the North had in the 1990s, could devastate the South's capital. They are part of a 12,000-strong force of self-propelled and easily moved artillery and rockets. And though they are old, they could sustain a firing pace of up to 500,000 rounds per hour against the U.S.-South Korean Combined Forces Command defenses for several hours.

The private political intelligence group Stratfor notes that the shells used in the recent attack on Yeonpyeong Island were incendiary and possibly thermobaric -- a class of so-called fuel-air bombs that produces much longer blast waves than traditional explosives with the aim of increasing casualties and property damage.

In analyzing the pattern of fire and results, Stratfor adds that there was a fairly high dud rate -- roughly a quarter of the rounds that failed to explode.

Fire and Flood

But the North still has the power to destroy a half-century of industrial development in South Korea, a country that's a key trading partner of the U.S. and an integrated cog in the global economy. That's in addition to the devastation it could cause to the South Korean population and its American and other foreign guests.

North Korea also has the manpower to stage a short-term blitzkrieg of the South with little time needed for preparation, though the U.S. and South Korean air superiority would likely stop that advance from going all the way to Seoul.

And the North could unleash chemical and biological weapons, its small nuclear arsenal, and even flash floods with dams upstream from the DMZ.

The U.S. counteroffensive plans are all about stopping the North Koreans in their tracks and quickly decapitating the regime.

As the North Korean forces work their way through the rugged, mountainous terrain to the south, U.S. air power would use the northern tanks and infantry's narrow access routes as killing zones.

Meanwhile, as air- and sea-based missiles took out North Korean command and intelligence targets, a U.S. Marine expeditionary force and South Korean units could stage an amphibious assault positioning them to quickly move toward and seize control of Pyongyang.

But the South Koreans would have to withstand days of destruction while such an invasion was carried out.

Nuclear Unknowns

It isn't clear how North Korea could or would deploy its small nuclear arsenal.

Almost certain is that suspected North Korean nuclear facilities would be among the first U.S. targets.

And almost just as certain is that the U.S. wouldn't retaliate itself with nuclear weapons -- in part because of how that would affect China, South Korea and North Korean civilians, and in part because the U.S. has devastating conventional weapons at its disposal for a Korean conflict.

Still, North Korea's atomic weapons remain one of the biggest question marks on the peninsula. Adding to the confusion, senior Obama administration and intelligence officials told The New York Times that Pyongyang's recently unveiled uranium-enrichment program may be "significantly more advanced" than Iran's, involving hidden nuclear facilities around the country that outsiders haven't detected.

That's sure to be on the agenda of Deputy Secretary of State Jim Steinberg, who left Washington on Tuesday to lead a high-level delegation to Beijing.

China, North Korea's principal patron, has publicly declined to chastise Pyongyang after the sinking of the Cheonan and the artillery attack last month. And after participating in multinational talks over the past decade aimed at denuclearizing North Korea, Beijing has recently stayed silent on that issue as well.

As in peace, China would be an extremely influential player on the Korean Peninsula should war break out.

Half a century ago, it fought on North Korea's side. Now, Beijing's affairs seem far too interwoven with the West's to even consider taking sides in such a conflict.

But in war, all bets are off.

**jasmine** · 01-13-2011, 08:17 AM

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/11/no..._lnk3%7C195012

North Korea Becoming a Bigger Threat to US, Gates Says

North Korea's nuclear weapons capabilities and development of intercontinental missiles are apparently advancing faster than the United States has acknowledged in the past -- making the capricious communist state a bigger potential threat in the coming years.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ratcheted up the Obama administration's judgment of the dangers posed by Pyongyang during a news conference in Beijing after discussing North Korea with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Pool / Getty Images
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shakes hands with Chinese President Hu Jintao at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday. Gates appears to be trying to coax the Chinese leadership into taking a more active role in defusing the North Korean nuclear threat.

And his remarks may in part be aimed at pushing the Chinese leadership to treat more actively a problem that Washington considers more than a regional peril.

"With the North Koreans' continuing development of nuclear weapons, and their development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, North Korea is becoming a direct threat to the United States, and we have to take that into account," Gates said.

Asked about the new progress he described in North Korean's intercontinental ballistic missiles, Gates said he doesn't think "it's an immediate threat" but one that's less than five years away.

Heightening the urgency of dealing with the North Koreans, Gates added, is South Koreans' unwillingness to "tolerate the kind of provocations the North Koreans have engaged in for many years," including the sinking of a South Korean naval ship last spring and the November artillery shelling of a South Korean island that killed four people.

"Clearly, if there is another provocation, there will be pressure on the South Korean government to react," said Gates, who is scheduled to visit Japan and South Korea later this week.

"We don't want to see the situation that we've seen so many times before, which is the North Koreans engage in a provocation and then everybody scrambles diplomatically to try and put Humpty Dumpty back together again," he said.

Until today, U.S. officials have generally described North Korea's nuclear program as a threat to neighbors -- including Japan and South Korea -- the U.S. is obligated by treaties to defend, and as a broader international proliferation problem. Constantly strapped for cash, Pyongyang is believed to have sold to or exchanged nuclear materiel and know-how with Pakistan, Syria and others.

By describing the North's ability to strike the U.S. itself as a threat not too far off, Gates may be raising the stakes for a renewal of the repeated rounds of diplomacy that saw the North renege on several agreements it made over the past decade.

Last month South Korea said it would consider a return to the six-party talks, which include the two Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the U.S. And this week it rebuffed a North Korean overture for bilateral talks aimed simply at getting more food aid for the impoverished North, which is again suffering widespread famine.

Gates suggested any new diplomacy will have to include concrete actions by the North -- "I don't want to buy the same horse twice" -- and that possible proof of North Korean sincerity could include moratoriums on missile tests and tests of a nuclear bomb.

Though the North successfully set off nuclear explosions in 2006 and 2009, it hasn't yet tested an actual nuclear warhead of the kind that could be placed on an ICBM and directed at the U.S.

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-12-2013, 09:51 AM

North Korea: Does nullifying the 1953 Korean armistice mean war?
By Peter Weber | The Week – 9 hrs ago.

Things are getting very tense on the Korean Peninsula

On Monday, things went from bad to worse on the Korean peninsula. The official North Korean state newspaper Rodong Sinmun said that the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War has been "declared invalid," and "the time for final showdown has arrived." Pyongyang also apparently disconnected the emergency hotline between North and South Korea, a Red Cross telephone line, blaming a joint U.S.-South Korea military exercise that began on March 1 and continues into April. Last week, North Korea threatened to pre-emptively nuke the U.S.

In response, Washington added new sanctions against North Korea, on top of tough United Nations Security Council measures implemented last week to punish Pyongyang for a February nuclear weapons test. The new U.S. sanctions target the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea, trying to freeze it from the U.S. financial system, and blacklist three North Korean officials.

"The United States will not play the game of accepting empty promises or yielding to threats," Thomas Donilon, President Obama's national security advisor, said Monday at the Asia Society in New York. "To get the assistance it desperately needs and the respect it claims it wants, North Korea will have to change course.

Scrapping the 1953 armistice could be a really big deal — the agreement is in lieu of a peace treaty, and it also set up the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) — but, as the U.S., U.N., and South Korea all pointed out, North Korea can't just unilaterally nullify the armistice, since it was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly. Still, formal nullification or not, "Seoul is concerned that the North is clearing a path for an attack or other provocation," says Alastair Gale in The Wall Street Journal.

"So why are the North Koreans acting so crazy?" says Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest. It appears Pyongyang's "fraying relationship with China" is the main culprit. Beijing not only agreed to the new U.N. sanctions, but according to the blog Ask A Korean, it's also cracking down on cross-border smuggling, sending prices for basic foodstuffs in North Korea soaring by as much as 70 percent.

That's potentially a big deal if true. The sanctions which just passed last week were some of the strictest imposed yet on the North — and these sanctions have almost certainly not started biting yet. The young Kim [Jong Un] is still an untested leader, even in the eyes of his wretched, brainwashed countrymen, and a wave of nationwide privations to kick off his reign cannot be a welcome development. Though an uprising seems unlikely given how things have gone in the past, rampant famine probably won't help him solidify his authority..... Though it may be wishful thinking, here's hoping that this latest bit of brinksmanship may be some of the North's last. They really do seem to have finally painted themselves into a corner this time. [American Interest]

Shredding a "sacrosanct armistice agreement" and all nonaggression pacts, cutting the key military hotline, declaring "all-out war," and threatening to nuke America — "in a way, it's almost inspiring how many unique and different types of threats the regime has been able to drum up over the last several weeks," says John Hudson at Foreign Policy. And after "playing the nuke card," it's hard to imagine what else Kim can threaten to "manifest his rage." But sadly, there are still a few "tools in his temper-tantrum toolbox, according to top North Korean experts."

Threaten Internal Instability : It's a little counterintuitive but not out of the question. The threat of internal chaos, if delivered from the highest rungs of power, probably wouldn't intimidate the United States, but it would certainly spook China, which wants to avoid a flood of North Korean refugees across its border....

Threaten to Share Nukes : This could get the West's attention...

'Demonstrate' That the Armistice Is Over : Short of all-out war, this tactic could manifest itself in the form of a modest conventional military hit on South Korea — an approach Pyongyang took in 2010.... It goes without saying that the move would carry the risk of a South Korean counteroffensive and the end of food aid from the South. [Foreign Policy]

Or, North Korea could resort to "acts of terrorism," like bombing airliners or assassinating South Korean officials, says Hudson. "Regardless, it's safe to say that any escalation beyond the current juncture represents a step into unchartered and extremely dangerous territory."

North Korea will likely do something, Victor Cha at the Center for Strategic and International Studies tells The Los Angeles Times. Not only is Kim Jong Un furious about the sanctions and the U.S.-South Korean military drill, but since 1992, Pyongyang has greeted every new South Korean leader with some sort of military provocation — and President Park Geun-hye was inaugurated Feb. 25.

But at least one expert says Pyongyang is just engaging in very loud saber-rattling. Kim's increasingly provocative language "bears some watching, but I don't think this is a sign of impending conflict," Christopher Hill, George W. Bush's top envoy at North Korean nuclear talks, tells The Los Angeles Times. Kim and his government are trapped between the starving, unhappy North Korean population and China, and that's who they are really aiming their rhetoric at. "I don't think there is anywhere they can go," Hill concludes. "There aren't a lot of great choices."

http://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-do...065000975.html

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-26-2013, 09:32 AM

North Korea's military warned Tuesday its artillery and rocket forces are at their highest-level combat posture in the latest in a string of bellicose threats aimed at South Korea and the United States. http://bit.ly/15P7pSI

NKorea puts artillery forces at top combat posture
March 26, 2013 9:51 AM CDT ~ By HYUNG-JIN KIM Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea's military warned Tuesday that its artillery and rocket forces are at their highest-level combat posture in the latest in a string of bellicose threats aimed at South Korea and the United States.

The announcement came as South Koreans marked the third anniversary of the sinking of a warship in which 46 South Korean sailors died. Seoul says the ship was hit by a North Korean torpedo, while the North denies involvement.

Seoul's Defense Ministry said Tuesday it hasn't seen any suspicious North Korean military activity and that officials are analyzing the North's warning. Analysts say a direct North Korean attack is extremely unlikely, especially during joint U.S.-South Korean military drills that end April 30, though there's some worry about a provocation after the training wraps up.

The rival Koreas have had several bloody naval skirmishes in disputed Yellow Sea waters since 1999. In November 2010, a North Korean artillery strike on a South Korean island killed two marines and two civilians.

North Korea, angry over routine U.S.-South Korean drills and recent U.N. sanctions punishing it for its Feb. 12 nuclear test, has vowed to launch a nuclear strike against the United States and repeated its nearly two-decade-old threat to reduce Seoul to a "sea of fire." Despite the rhetoric, outside weapons analysts have seen no proof that North Korea has mastered the technology needed to build a warhead small enough to mount on a missile.

On Tuesday, the North Korean army's Supreme Command said it will take "practical military action" to protect national sovereignty and its leadership in response to what it called U.S. and South Korean plots to attack.

The statement, carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency, cited the participation of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in South Korea-U.S. drills.

North Korea's field artillery forces - including strategic rocket and long-range artillery units that are "assigned to strike bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor troops in the U.S. mainland and on Hawaii and Guam and other operational zones in the Pacific as well as all the enemy targets in South Korea and its vicinity" - will be placed on "the highest alert from this moment," the statement said.

The North's recent threats are seen partly as efforts to strengthen internal loyalty to young leader Kim Jong Un and to build up his military credentials.

Kim "needs to show he has the guts. The best way to do that is to use the military might that he commands," said Lee Yoon-gyu, a North Korea expert at Korea National Defense University in Seoul. "This paves the way for greater praise for him if North Korea makes a provocation later and claims victory."

Kim will eventually be compelled to do "something provocative to prove the threats weren't empty," Lee said.

Meanwhile, websites and organizations run by North Korean defectors in South Korea said they suffered cyberattacks on Tuesday, one week after computer systems at some South Korean banks and TV networks were widely disrupted.

Daily NK, which posts news about North Korea, said it experienced a cyperattack, and South Korea's Yonhap news agency said Free North Korea Radio also was attacked.

Yonhap said a computer network used by seven local governments was also briefly attacked, as was a network belonging to broadcaster YTN.

Authorities have not confirmed who was behind last week's cyberattack but suspect North Korea.

At a ceremony marking the third anniversary of the warship sinking, new South Korean President Park Geun-hye urged the North again to abandon its nuclear weapons program. "Focusing its national strength on the development of nuclear weapons while its people are suffering starvation ... will only bring international isolation to themselves," Park said in a televised speech at a national cemetery south of Seoul where the 46 sailors are buried.

Associated Press writer Sam Kim contributed to this report.

http://www.wafb.com/story/21792867/n...combat-posture

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-30-2013, 03:33 PM

#WhyAustin: Mockery meets Kim Jong Un’s threat to strike Austin, Texas

Posted at 1:34 pm on March 29, 2013 by Twitchy Staff

http://twitchy.com/2013/03/29/whyaus...-austin-texas/

Time for some more saber-rattling from North Korea. Kim Jong Un has vowed to strike targets in the United States, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013...#ixzz2Ovub7FNh

As always, North Korean threats go down best with a mockery chaser.

Rather than cowering in fear, Twitter users are asking — and answering — #WhyAustin?

Calvin Drewlidge @FigDrewton

If North Korea had the internet they could see us all making fun of them on twitter.

3:49 PM - 29 Mar 13

Miké @ThePantau

Because Stubb's BBQ won't deliver to Pyongyang. #WhyAustin

3:51 PM - 29 Mar 13

Stephen Green @VodkaPundit

Because Houston shoots back. #whyaustin

5:29 PM - 29 Mar 13

TEDx Austin @TEDxAustin

Sorry, but his application was just not that strong. #whyaustin

4:36 PM - 29 Mar 13

Will Franklin @WILLisms

Because Austin's smugness about its 5.4% unemployment rate has grated on Kim Jong-un's last nerve. http://www.twc.state.tx.us/news/pres...2913epress.pdf …. #whyaustin

Robert Lendvai  @robertlendvai

Kim Jung Un is still pissed with Dell technical support. #whyaustin

3:49 PM - 29 Mar 13

Shelly Brisbin @shelly

"Forbes rates Austin third most nuke-able city in US. Mayor credits educated workforce, music scene." #whyaustin

3:33 PM - 29 Mar 13

Gilbert @gilby5125

Kim Jong might hate the hipsters as much as Houston does #whyaustin

5:19 PM - 29 Mar 13 from Houston, TX, United States

Daniel Drezner @dandrezner

Because "Friday Night Lights" ended its run and NOBODY puts Connie Britton into a corner. #whyaustin

4:10 PM - 29 Mar 13

Paul Szoldra @PaulSzoldra

Austin is home to U.S. strategic BBQ reserves. RT @dblanchard: He just wanted some brisket. #whyaustin #sxdprk pic.twitter.com/6iB0F7oYhM

3:19 PM - 29 Mar 13

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-30-2013, 03:52 PM

North Korea declares war, or something
posted at 8:31 am on March 30, 2013 by Jazz Shaw

So now can we deport Dennis Rodman to Pyongyang? No? Well, you don’t know until you ask.

In case you’d already gone to bed and missed it, (like me) it appears that the latest in the line of vertically challenged Dear Leaders in North Korea has had enough of the United States and South Korea doing… whatever it is we do that annoys them, I guess. Probably all that bothersome food we make sure they get each year. Anyway, they’ve found their casus belli and have decided to declare war.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...92T00020130330

North Korea said on Saturday it was entering a “state of war” with South Korea in a continuing escalation of angry rhetoric directed at Seoul and Washington, but the South brushed off the statement as little more than tough talk.

The two Koreas have been technically in a state of war for six decades under an armistice that ended their 1950-53 conflict. Despite its threats few people see any indication Pyongyang will risk a near-certain defeat by re-starting full-scale war.

You can read the full declaration of war issued by Kim Jong-un here http://live.reuters.com/Event/North_Korea/70001409 assuming you can make it through the broken sentence structure. Hey, I’m not trying to go all ugly American on you here. I’m sure that if you’re fluent in the language and heard it read aloud in the original version, it’s probably a stirring, patriotic, muscular statement of power and glory. But once it makes it through the discount translator into English for the press conference, it comes off a little more Heckle and Jeckle than Churchill.

The moves of the U.S. imperialists to violate the sovereignty of the DPRK and encroach upon its supreme interests have entered an extremely grave phase. Under this situation, the dear respected Marshal Kim Jong Un, brilliant commander of Mt. Paektu, convened an urgent operation meeting on the performance of duty of the Strategic Rocket Force of the Korean People’s Army for firepower strike and finally examined and ratified a plan for firepower strike…

1.From this moment, the north-south relations will be put at the state of war and all the issues arousing between the north and the south will be dealt with according to the wartime regulations.

The state of neither peace nor war has ended on the Korean Peninsula.

2. If the U.S. and the south Korean puppet group perpetrate a military provocation for igniting a war against the DPRK in any area including the five islands in the West Sea of Korea or in the area along the Military Demarcation Line, it will not be limited to a local war, but develop into an all-out war, a nuclear war.

I just don’t know what you do about these clowns at this point. Their people are sitting there starving to death in the midst of many other nations which have at least come into the 20th century, if not the 21st, and are enjoying the benefits of living in the real world. I realize that Ed already pointed out that North Korea isn’t entirely a paper tiger and could cause some actual trouble, but the real question over there is whether or not China can get Little Kim back on his leash.

If push came to shove, we could probably destroy their entire military infrastructure – at least the technological part of it – in 48 hours or less, but we’d likely take out a fair portion of their population in the process. And that just turns into a PR nightmare with the rest of Asia, and particularly China. Then again, maybe Kim heard that our re-order money for bunker-busters was, well… you know. Sequestration.

In the end, this is probably just another stunt by the new leader to impress his people with how macho he is and to whip up their patriotic feelings. It’s always better to get your people unified against a perceived foreign threat than to give them too much time to sit around and realize they don’t have anything to eat. It’s just another day in Pyongyang, I guess. But I still think we should send Rodman back, and he can take that little Gangnam Style pop singer with him and drop him off in Seoul on his way.

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/3...-or-something/

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-30-2013, 06:55 PM

North Korea Declares “State of War;” US Vows to Stand up to Threats
March 30, 2013

SITUATION REPORT

Tensions with North Korea continue to rise after Pyongyang said today that the Korean peninsula is entering a ‘state of war’ and U.S. officials vowed additional displays of military power to show America’s determination to protect its allies in the region. Although many in the West will laugh at the map in the above photo behind North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un supposedly showing a plan to attack the United States with missiles, the North’s escalating belligerent rhetoric has further raised the potential for a military incident.

Read more: http://www.lignet.com/home.aspx?prom...#ixzz2P4ufDJjg

North Korean News Agency photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un meeting with his generals. In the background to the left is a map with lines drawn between North Korea and U.S. cities in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland. The lines supposedly are planned trajectories for an attack by North Korean ballistic missiles against the United States. According to the website NK News, Korean writing on the map reads “U.S. mainland strike plan.”

Read more: http://www.lignet.com/home.aspx?prom...#ixzz2P4uKcqLI
All Rights Reserved LIGNET.com

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-30-2013, 08:35 PM

**Jolie Rouge** · 03-30-2013, 09:17 PM

**Jolie Rouge** · 04-03-2013, 05:23 PM

North Korea approves nuclear attack on U.S.
(UPDATE: “Today or tomorrow”)
April 3, 2013 ~ BY: JORGE BONILLA

The North Korean regime has escalated its rhetoric yet again. In a statement released by the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army, the Kim regime has indicated that a nuclear attack on the United States has been approved.

Per Seoul’s Yonhap News Agency, the Hermit Kingdom vows “actual military actions”, among which are “reckless operations” involving “cutting-edge nuclear weapons”. This threat is the latest in a series of provocations which include the declaration of a renewed state of war between the Koreas, an announced restarting of the Yongbyon reactor, live-fire exercises featuring targets that depict U.S. soldiers, and a closing of a joint Korean industrial complex along the border. At least this time we placed our missile defense systems in place, along with the Raptors, the Stealths, and as Javier noted yesterday, the USS John S. McCain.

Zerohedge nails it by indicating that this would be the ultimate apotheosis of Paul Krugman’s disaster stimuli theory. Of course, it goes without saying that in such an exchange, Pyongyang would inevitably receive its very own “stimulus”. Follow that link for a helpful missile range guide.

It’s 3 A.M., the phone is ringing…and God Halp Us, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel are the new receptionists.

UPDATE: AFP has a full report, with the DPRK threatening an attack “today or tomorrow”:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp...52b88ddefeb.01

North Korea dramatically escalated its warlike rhetoric on Thursday, warning that it had authorised plans for nuclear strikes on targets in the United States.

“The moment of explosion is approaching fast,” the North Korean military said, warning that war could break out “today or tomorrow”.

Pyongyang’s latest pronouncement came as Washington scrambled to reinforce its Pacific missile defences, preparing to send ground-based interceptors to Guam and dispatching two Aegis class destroyers to the region.

Tension was also high on the North’s heavily-fortified border with South Korea, after Kim Jong-Un’s isolated regime barred South Koreans from entering a Seoul-funded joint industrial park on its side of the frontier.

In a statement published by the state KCNA news agency, the Korean People’s Army general staff warned Washington that US threats would be “smashed by… cutting-edge smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear strike means”.

“The merciless operation of our revolutionary armed forces in this regard has been finally examined and ratified,” the statement said.

This could all still be a bluff, but no one should assume so.

http://shark-tank.net/2013/04/03/bre...attack-on-u-s/

Thread: A New Korean War Would Be Devastating

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