On April 15 2013 01:22 barnEbiss wrote: Also Fighters for free North Korea are supposed to release balloons into the North tomorrow so thats going to be another potentate hotspot issue if North Korea follows through with threat to shell location.
And if someone didn't know already, there are propaganda leaflets on the balloons which are sent to North.
North Korea warned Saturday that South Korea will face a "catastrophic situation" if it allows anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets to be flown into its territory across the border ahead of a major holiday.
A group of North Korean defectors and a Seoul-based civic organization have said they jointly plan to fly tens of thousands of leaflets with anti-Pyongyang messages, often mixed with U.S. dollar bills, via balloon timed to the upcoming birthday of the North's late founder Kim Il-sung, which falls on Monday.
In a commentary posted on the Web site of its propaganda Internet outlet, Uriminzokkiri, the communist North said a catastrophic situation will occur if the leaflets are sent cross the border on the late leader's birthday, dubbed the "Day of the Sun." The late leader, who died in 1994, is the grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un.
Activists in the South often send anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets across the border, condemning the autocratic North Korean regime and calling for a popular uprising against the leadership.
WTF ? Do they want the war to happen ? How can they be so provocating...
i would like to see whatever is going to happen (be it war or not) happen sooner rather than later.. every day that this is delayed is another day that the north korean people have to suffer through starvation, slavery, and torture
That's gambling far beyond reason no ? Maybe i don't understand all that it means.
what i am saying is that somehow this whole thing is going to come to a climax and (hopefully) the end result will be with the NK government being replaced
i am hoping that, whatever it is, it happens sooner instead of later so that the NK populace doesn't have to continue suffering
That and the fact that if "it" is actually war, it'd better be now than later since NK's army and tech will only improve over time. If they can buy enough time to get actually decent intercontinental ballistic missiles that have reasonable accuracy and can target New York, it probably won't end very well, will it? I'm not saying that it's best to do a preemptive strike, but they better do something now while they can win the war with... a little less casualties than wait until the situation spirals out of control w/ 10 times bigger casualties.
i agree completely. i hope that we can do it with china on our side though.. i suspect they (we) are working on getting china's consent and then may just do a "quick" wipeout of NK's artillery.. i wonder how long it would take to eliminate NK's artillery with the firepower we currently have in the area... anybody seen any estimates?
Probably not quick enough, any aggression would probably result in substantial NK counterattack on seoul. Can you imagine how difficult a coordinated strike would be that would target ALL of the artillery? probably not that easy.
On April 16 2013 05:17 goldenwitch wrote: I think you are just confused about this issue. It's one thing to put things into space with a three stage rocket. It's quite another to develop the technology to move a nuke across the pacific with enough accuracy to hit something.
Again, to put it in a comparison with Russia, Russia is still trying to develop that technology.
A military estimation is always generous to the enemy, especially when there is potential funding that might be obtained by considering the worst case scenario. To say that NK can successfully nuke even Seattle is exactly that, a generous estimation to deal with worst case scenarios.
Have you even considered how much it costs to fire a single one of these missiles? To imagine that NK, who again, can't even provide power to their entire country, could fire enough ICBMs to ensure that they are reliable enough to load a nuclear warhead in, is in my opinion entirely unlikely.
Even assuming, as you say, that North Korea can make HUGE leaps of technology in weeks/months/1-2 years, how do you figure that the western world given FAR more resources, FAR more people working on the subject, and a HUGE head start, would somehow fail to keep up with North Korea in an arms race? We have RAILGUNS. They have like 5 working planes. We have NAVAL DEFENSE LASERS, they couldn't afford the fuel required to run our navy.
To summarize, you are underestimating the leap in technology between space age and information age, and even if you weren't, the western world would still be advancing faster in technology than North Korea to the point where any amount of time puts them further behind us rather than ahead.
"The Topol-M is a cold-launched, three-stage, solid-propellant, silo-based or road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile." Same goes for its predecessor.
Other than that, I agree with what you say. However, do note, railguns are still experimental/in testing at this time, and sea/land-based lasers are hardly reliable, and I'm pretty sure ineffective against ICBMs. A lot of experimenting was done in the past by the US and USSR/Russia. Atmospheric interference is an extremely significant deterrent of effectiveness, especially against something as high and as fast and as large as an ICBM. 1930s Katyusha rockets are a lot different from ICBMs in terms of countering.
On April 16 2013 07:37 aksfjh wrote: Weren't they supposed to do something on the 15th?
They were suppose to do something weeks ago, namely go to WAR. They obviously did not follow that up so who cares at this point. Everything else after that announcement is kinda "whatever". The intents of the discussions in this thread are more "threatening" right now.
Now that Kim Il-Sung's birthday on April 15 is over, the next important dates are April 25 = 81st anniversary of the foundation of Korean People's Army in NK April 30 = US-South Korea joint military drill ends
South Korea and US have already shown that they are willing to talk and negotiate a few days ago, so NK might just take it as a "win" without firing a single missile. That way, Kim Jong-Un can at least save his face, wihch might be as important as actual gain in their culture and as a politically vulnerable young leader.
btw, mod note at the top is out of date. No one is talking about the ethics of nuking Japan anymore.
Yeah we were just discussing it in the office. Was quite a very very disturbing documentary. They were showing hospitals with nobody in them.It showed a factory that should produce electric generators, the factory had no power to it. Then it showed a "typical" farm house for a farmer which just looked like a show home. They also showed South Korea and then North Korea from space. It is so different. The South Korean half is light up and looks like a normal country and the North Korean half is just so dark and mysterious. It is literally like there is no one there :S
On April 16 2013 19:52 Pandemona wrote: Yeah we were just discussing it in the office. Was quite a very very disturbing documentary. They were showing hospitals with nobody in them.It showed a factory that should produce electric generators, the factory had no power to it. Then it showed a "typical" farm house for a farmer which just looked like a show home. They also showed South Korea and then North Korea from space. It is so different. The South Korean half is light up and looks like a normal country and the North Korean half is just so dark and mysterious. It is literally like there is no one there :S
It was good though, so i do recommend it
Its the land of whispers and ghosts... spooky place.
On April 16 2013 18:26 Orek wrote: Now that Kim Il-Sung's birthday on April 15 is over, the next important dates are April 25 = 81st anniversary of the foundation of Korean People's Army in NK April 30 = US-South Korea joint military drill ends
South Korea and US have already shown that they are willing to talk and negotiate a few days ago, so NK might just take it as a "win" without firing a single missile. That way, Kim Jong-Un can at least save his face, wihch might be as important as actual gain in their culture and as a politically vulnerable young leader.
One would think that Kim Jong-Un would try to grab such a chance to put an end to threats, but apparently not...:
North Korea issued new threats against South Korea on Tuesday, vowing "sledge-hammer blows" of retaliation if South Korea did not apologize for anti-North Korean protests the previous day when the North was celebrating the birth of its founding leader.
[...]
But a senior U.S. military official in South Korea said the North Korean leadership was looking for a way to cool down its rhetoric after weeks of warnings of war.
[...]
But the North's KCNA news agency said on Tuesday the North Korean army had issued an ultimatum to the South after rallies in the South on Monday at which portraits of North Korea's leaders were burned.
"Our retaliatory action will start without any notice from now," KCNA reported, citing military leaders of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), as North Korea is officially known.
I read somewhere else that since this was a statement by the military, Kim Jong-Un wouldn't necessarily be bound by it, so that he could still claim a "win" at the end of the threats that he was responsible for.
I wonder what NK's next step is though. So far, they have managed to (temporarily) lose the valuable income from Kaesong, royally piss off their only ally even further, and not getting to any negotiations as a recognized nuclear state. I wonder if they're able to cut their losses, as it were, or if they feel they have to keep going until they get a tangible benefit. (To be fair, though, they have managed to postpone a US rocket launch and cause the US to treat them as a nuclear threat, although they are not "accepted" as a nuclear state. However, I can't really see any of this translating to any actual benefit for NK yet...).
Is the BBC Panorama documentary link. However it probably is regional based as it is broadcasted on iPlayer, you can try to proxy it i guess but other than that i can't help ;_;
Is the BBC Panorama documentary link. However it probably is regional based as it is broadcasted on iPlayer, you can try to proxy it i guess but other than that i can't help ;_;
Is the BBC Panorama documentary link. However it probably is regional based as it is broadcasted on iPlayer, you can try to proxy it i guess but other than that i can't help ;_;
Watched it before and if i am honest its not that revealing, there is a much better documentary on youtube
Those who haven't still seen this, one of the most recent ones (with the new BBC doc). It's worth checking out.
Also, rofl:
North Korea Pirates Spy Tools and Porn on BitTorrent
With only a few hundred IP-addresses North Korea’s Internet presence is rather limited. Only a choice few are able to connect to the World Wide Web and access all the free information that comes with it. TorrentFreak decided to take a deeper look at the BitTorrent downloads that can be traced back to North Korean IP-addresses and the results are intriguing, yet expected.
Over the past months we’ve discovered pirates in the most unusual places, from the FBI, through major record labels, to the Vatican.
Continuing down this path we decided to take a look at what’s being shared from North Korean IP-addresses, threats aside.
With full Internet connectivity limited to a tiny minority of the population there’s not much BitTorrent sharing going on, but the results are worth reporting.
A search in the database of BitTorrent monitoring company Scaneye returned 84 titles that were shared from North Korea. These file-sharers used a variety of BitTorrent clients and several IP-addresses that are officially registered to the dictatorial regime.
One of the titles that jumps out immediately is “Net Monitor for Employees Professional,” which seamlessly fits the country’s profile. Ironically, the downloader in question did very little to cover his or her own tracks.
The above reveals a bit more about the download habits of a few North Koreans. We have to note though, that North Korean IP-ranges have been vulnerable to hijacks in the past so you’re never 100% sure who might be using them. Nevertheless, even in these instances you wouldn’t expect the hijacker to use IP-addresses for casual downloading.
Is the BBC Panorama documentary link. However it probably is regional based as it is broadcasted on iPlayer, you can try to proxy it i guess but other than that i can't help ;_;
Thanks, seem to work outside UK.
Doesn't work for me... not sure how ti make it work through proxy.
NORTH Korea has laid out onerous conditions for any talks with Seoul or Washington, including the withdrawal of UN sanctions and a guaranteed end to South Korea-US joint military drills.
...
"If the US and the South enemies ... genuinely want dialogue and negotiation, they should take these steps,'' the North's National Defence Commission said in a statement.
...
"The first step will be withdrawing the UN Security Council resolutions cooked up for ridiculous grounds,'' the statement said.
...
"Second, you need to tell the whole world that you will not get involved in any rehearsal for a nuclear war that threatens our nation. Dialogues and war games can never go together,'' the statement said.
It also called for the withdrawal of all "US tools'' for a nuclear war from the Korean peninsula and a promise never to deploy them again.
The Commission statement was issued hours after the North's main body for inter-Korean relations ruled out any immediate return to the negotiating table.
The South's dialogue offer is a "deceptive artifice'' designed to appease public opinion and to hide its responsibility for pushing the peninsula "to a state of war'', the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said.
On April 13 2013 01:41 Grettin wrote: Todays VICE episode (HBO) is going to be related to North-Korea. If you don't know what Vice is, check out their Youtube channel. In short, they have made lots of documentaries around the world and they also did "Vice guide to North-Korea", which i suggest you to check out if you have somehow missed it.
VICE joins a pastor who helps North Koreans reach freedom escaping to South Korea; however, very few ever take the risk and attempt to defect fearing the brutal punishment if they are caught.
EPT
