North Korea and South Korea

[GreyhoundFan]

This is terrifying: "The message behind the murder: North Korea’s assassination sheds light on chemical weapons arsenal"

Spoiler

In a case with a thousand plot twists, there has been but one constant in the murder investigation of Kim Jong Nam: Nothing is ever what it seems.

The victim himself — the playboy half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — was traveling under false papers when he died and had to be identified using DNA. The two women accused of killing him turned out to be hired dupes, paid a few dollars to perform what they thought was a reality-TV stunt.

Stranger still was the murder weapon, liquid VX, a toxin so powerful that a few drops rubbed onto the skin killed the victim in minutes, yet it failed to harm the two women who applied the poison with their bare hands. Even more mysterious: why North Korea would go to extravagant lengths to use a battlefield-grade chemical weapon on foreign soil, only to work equally hard to cover its tracks.

For the prosecutors preparing for the first court hearings later this month, some of the mysteries behind Kim Jong Nam’s death inside a Malaysian airport terminal will likely never be resolved. But nearly five months after the killing, U.S. and Asian officials have a clearer view of the attack’s significance. In carrying out history’s first state-sponsored VX assassination in a country 3,000 miles from its borders, North Korea has demonstrated a new willingness to use its formidable arsenal of deadly toxins and poisons to kill or intimidate enemies on foreign soil, analysts say.

Seen in the light of North Korea’s recent flurry of provocative missiles tests, Kim Jong Nam’s killing now looks to many experts like a proving exercise for a weapons system — in this case, a robust chemical-weapons stockpile that Pyongyang is thought to have built over decades and kept carefully under wraps.

“The choice of weapons was not accidental,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former senior analyst on North Korea at the CIA and currently managing director for Korea at the Bower Group Asia. “Everything about this incident was intended to send a message.”

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have long believed that North Korea possesses significant stores of the nerve agents VX and sarin — and probably biological weapons as well — but in the past, such arsenals were assumed to be intended as a deterrent against foreign attacks. But in the attack on Kim Jong Nam, North Korea revealed a strategy for using chemicals that looks a lot like ­cyberwarfare: limited, highly secretive attacks that can damage an enemy without inviting massive retaliation.

Whether Kim Jong Un would risk such an attack against a foreign government — even the United States — is unclear. But the February incident is a reminder that North Korea has options for striking targets abroad that do not hinge on the country’s ability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, current and former U.S. officials say.

“North Korea is bad enough when you’re talking about their nuclear and missiles program,” Rebecca Hersman, a former Defense Department deputy assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction, said at a recent policy forum. “But I think we ignore their chemical and biological programs truly at our own peril.”

Walking into a trap

Kim Jong Nam probably knew an attack was coming, though he might not have imagined where, or how.

The 45-year-old eldest son of dead North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had been living in exile in the Chinese province of Macau since 2003, and he had become a vocal critic of North Korea’s repressive communist government. He became a probable candidate for assassination after his younger half brother took control of the country in late 2011, claiming the job that had once been promised to him. His fate was likely sealed in 2013 when the newly installed leader ordered the execution of Jang Song Thaek, a prominent North Korean defense official and Kim Jong Nam’s uncle and longtime protector.

But when he strode into Kuala Lumpur’s KLIA2 airport with his light jacket and backpack on Feb. 13, he walked unknowingly into an exquisitely laid trap.

Not one, but two teams of assassins had rehearsed for the moment. The only ones Kim Jong Nam would see were female: two attractive women in their 20s who had been recruited locally. One of them, identified by police as Indonesian native Siti Aisyah, worked in a Kuala Lumpur massage parlor; the other, Doan Thi Huong, had moved from Vietnam to Malaysia to work in what authorities described vaguely as the “entertainment” industry.

Both would tell police that they were hired by a Korean man to perform “pranks,” such as smearing baby oil on strangers, for a hidden-camera video show. For their service, each was promised $90 in cash and a shot at future TV stardom.

But on Feb. 13, the surprise prepared for Kim Jong Nam was VX, not baby oil. In a sequence that would be captured on security-camera video and later broadcast around the world, Kim Jong Nam was accosted as he checked in for a flight in the airport’s departure lounge. A woman in a white sweatshirt is seen grabbing the North Korean’s face from behind. Although the images are unclear, police think the second woman helped smear the oily liquid over the victim’s cheeks.

At least four men — later identified by Malaysian officials as North Korean agents — are seen watching the attack and shadowing the visibly agitated Kim Jong Nam as he seeks help from police and an airport first-aid station. Minutes later, as the dying Kim is wheeled into an ambulance, the men slip through the departures gate to board flights out of the country.

The only ones who didn’t escape were the women and the victim himself. Aisyah and Huong mysteriously avoided serious injury — perhaps, weapons experts speculate, because each handled harmless precursor chemicals that became toxic only when mixed, or perhaps because both women quickly washed their hands after the attack.

Both are seen quickly entering airport lavatories after the attack, behavior that prosecutors have cited in accusing the two women of being knowingly complicit in Kim Jong Nam’s murder. The two women face court appearances later this month on charges of first-degree murder, a capital crime in Malaysia.

Kim Jong Nam, who quickly sought medical help after the attack, lost consciousness in the airport medical station and died in the ambulance, less than 20 minutes after the episode began.

It would take two autopsies and nearly two weeks to determine the name of the rare toxin that took his life. Malaysian investigators would conclude that the VX was smuggled into the country by North Korea, most likely in a commercial jetliner. It’s unclear whether the toxin arrived ready to use or in a form that required mixing two harmless ingredients to create. In either case, the advantage for the assassins is that only a few drops are needed to kill, said a U.S. official with years of experience in ­chemical-weapons defense.

“Was it assembled in Malaysia? Not necessarily,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing U.S. intelligence assessments of the North Korean threat. “A single three-ounce container that would fit in your carry-on luggage would hold far more than you’d ever need.”

Pyongyang’s stockpile

Until the Feb. 13 attack, hard evidence of Pyongyang’s arsenal of toxins did not exist, at least in the public realm. But for at least two decades, U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded that North Korea possesses a sizable stockpile of chemical weapons, with VX being one of many varieties.

A State Department report in 2001 found that North Korea was “already self-sufficient” in making all the necessary precursors for sarin and VX, as well as older weapons such as mustard gas. Drawing from an array of sources — from North Korean defectors and spies to satellite photos and electronic eavesdropping — U.S. agencies calculated the size of the country’s chemical stockpile at between 2,500 and 5,000 tons. That’s far larger than Syria’s arsenal at its peak, and larger than any known to exist in the world, except for those built by the Soviet and U.S. militaries during the Cold War.

A parallel but reportedly much smaller program produces biological weapons, current and former U.S. intelligence officials think. Published Defense Intelligence Agency documents have described efforts underway to weaponize at least four pathogens: anthrax, plague, cholera and biological toxins, such as botulinum.

Work on chemical and biological programs began years before Pyongyang tested its first nuclear bomb, and U.S. analysts suspect that both were intended at first as a deterrent against foreign attacks. But although North Korea regularly boasts of its achievements in atomic energy and missiles, its chemical and biological weapons have always been kept carefully hidden, according to a study released jointly last month by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the U.S. Korea Institute.

“North Korea has deliberately built its NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] infrastructures in extreme secrecy; undertaken camouflage, concealment and deception operations . . . and dispersed NBC facilities around the country,” report author Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a prominent expert on North Korean weapons systems, wrote in the report. “It is therefore probable that there are significant elements of the NBC programs and their infrastructures that are simply unknown outside the North Korean government.”

U.S. and South Korean defense officials alike take the threat seriously, so much so that both governments inoculate their troops against exposure to anthrax bacteria and even the smallpox virus. Soldiers deployed along the border are issued gas masks and protective suits and put through occasional drills to prepare for the day when canisters of VX or sarin are fired across the border in North Korean rockets or artillery shells.

Any such attack would certainly prompt a massive retaliation. But Kim Jong Nam’s assassination has forced U.S. officials to consider the possibility of a clandestine attack, one that might be more difficult to trace, or to defend against.

“With biological weapons, especially, there’s an opportunity for covert attack with deniability, since attribution would be difficult,” said Andrew C. Weber, former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons defense. Although U.S. officials are fixated on North Korea’s nuclear advances, a nuclear attack “is not the most likely, or possibly even the most consequential,” he said.

As Kim Jong Nam’s assassination demonstrated, the delivery of such weapons can be easy — especially for deadly pathogens, but also for toxic chemicals, he said. And any military response would be delayed for days or weeks while investigators attempted to find evidence that firmly pointed to a perpetrator.

“A chemical attack would be knowable, almost as soon as it happens,” Weber said. “But Kim Jong Un is a brutal guy, and he may have no qualms against doing it. Or he may just miscalculate.”

Sending a message

Kim Jong Un’s plan to use VX to kill his half brother included extensive measures to ensure secrecy — so many, in fact, that some experts think the North Koreans wanted to keep their enemies ignorant about its use of the toxin, or at least unsure.

After Kim Jong Nam’s death, Pyongyang requested the immediate return of his body, without an autopsy being performed. Malaysia refused, and soon afterward, local news media reported an attempt by unknown individuals to break into the morgue where the body was kept. The attempt failed, but in the weeks since, North Korea has insisted that the leader’s half brother died of a heart attack and that any reports of chemical toxins were lies spread by outsiders.

Some longtime North Korea analysts are convinced that the killing was intended mostly as a warning to other members of the Kim family who might be plotting Kim Jong Un’s overthrow. The leader has a history of extreme brutality toward relatives whom he suspects of plotting against him. He may have seen Kim Jong Nam — a free-spoken man of leisure who enjoyed protected status in China and was widely reported to have intelligence contacts with several foreign governments — as a possible future choice by Beijing to replace him.

“It might have just been an expression of how much he hates traitors,” said Joshua Pollack, a former government consultant on North Korean weapons programs and now editor of the journal Nonproliferation Review. “There’s no doubt that VX was an unusual choice for an assassination. But I think it was probably chosen because they thought no one would look for it.”

Other current and former U.S. officials say that North Korea would have calculated that the VX would be found eventually. According to these officials, Kim Jong Un’s plan was to showcase his ability to strike with terrifying weapons, while also concealing the evidence to reduce the chances of retaliation.

“His message about VX was, ‘We have it,’ ” said Terry, the former CIA analyst. “He knew they would eventually find it.”

Whatever the motivation, the tactic worked on nearly every ­level, North Korea experts say: A potential rival was eliminated. A capability to strike covertly, using one of the most fearsome chemical weapons ever designed, was amply demonstrated. And North Korea, while issuing denials that are widely seen as implausible, managed to get away with it, at least until now.

“They carry out an attack and make people afraid, but then ensure that there’s no evidence that can lead to real accountability,” Pollack said. “For them, that’s the sweet spot.”

Every article I read about NK is scarier than the previous one.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

This op-ed about North Korea is very interesting, a must read imho

What if North Korea isn't crazy?

Spoiler

Look at the world from North Korea’s perspective. The regime saw the collapse of the Soviet empire and an even more unsettling transformation in China, which went from being a fiery ideological soul mate to a pragmatic trading state that has eagerly integrated into world markets. These days, Beijing seems to view Pyongyang as a nuisance, and China now often votes to condemn and place sanctions against North Korea at the United Nations.

And the world’s most powerful country has made clear that North Korea is destined for the ash heap of history. After 9/11, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists emanating from the Middle East, President George W. Bush announced that the United States would no longer tolerate an “axis of evil” comprising Iraq, Iran — and North Korea. It invaded Iraq. Current U.S. policy toward Iran, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently said, is to “work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.” And regarding North Korea, President Trump wants China to “end this nonsense once and for all,” which again can only mean getting rid of the Kim government in some way.

So, the North Korean regime has tried to buy insurance. And in the realm of international affairs, the best insurance is having a nuclear capacity. Pyongyang knows that it has a large-enough army and the Korean theater of war is so small and dense that a conventional war would be unthinkable, producing hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of refugees pouring into China and South Korea. North Korea has accurately calculated that China and South Korea are more terrified of the chaos that would follow its collapse than of its nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps the right way to look at North Korea is as a smart, rational, calculating government that is functioning shrewdly given its priority of regime survival. More pressure only strengthens its resolve to buy even more insurance. How to handle it under these circumstances?

The first way to break the logjam in U.S. policy would be to persuade China to put real pressure on its ally. That won’t happen by serving President Xi Jinping chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. Beijing faces an understandable nightmare — under sanctions and pressure, North Korea collapses and the newly unified country becomes a giant version of South Korea, with a defense treaty with Washington, nearly 30,000 American troops and possibly dozens of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons — all on China’s border.

Washington will have to promise Beijing now that in the event of unification, it would withdraw its troops, change the nature of its treaty relationship with the new Korea and, working with China, eliminate Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

But pressure will work only if there is also some reason for North Korea to make concessions. Pyongyang has indicated in the past that it seeks a formal end to the Korean War (Washington signed only an armistice in 1953), a recognition of the regime and the lifting of sanctions. Obviously none of this should be offered right now, but there is no harm in talking to Pyongyang and searching for ways to trade some of these concessions for the complete eradication of the nuclear program.

It’s a bitter pill for Washington to swallow, but the alternative is to hope that China will act against its interests and crush its ally, or that North Korea will finally collapse. But hope is not a strategy.

Can you imagine Trump actually negotiating? Me neither. He'd need to be smart. Un seems deadbent on keeping his power over North Korea. But he must know that if North Korea is wiped away by nuclear war he won't be dictator supreme anymore. Is it bad that my hopes rest on a crazy dictator's sanity?

[GrumpyGran]

18 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is terrifying: "The message behind the murder: North Korea’s assassination sheds light on chemical weapons arsenal"

  Reveal hidden contents

In a case with a thousand plot twists, there has been but one constant in the murder investigation of Kim Jong Nam: Nothing is ever what it seems.

The victim himself — the playboy half brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — was traveling under false papers when he died and had to be identified using DNA. The two women accused of killing him turned out to be hired dupes, paid a few dollars to perform what they thought was a reality-TV stunt.

Stranger still was the murder weapon, liquid VX, a toxin so powerful that a few drops rubbed onto the skin killed the victim in minutes, yet it failed to harm the two women who applied the poison with their bare hands. Even more mysterious: why North Korea would go to extravagant lengths to use a battlefield-grade chemical weapon on foreign soil, only to work equally hard to cover its tracks.

For the prosecutors preparing for the first court hearings later this month, some of the mysteries behind Kim Jong Nam’s death inside a Malaysian airport terminal will likely never be resolved. But nearly five months after the killing, U.S. and Asian officials have a clearer view of the attack’s significance. In carrying out history’s first state-sponsored VX assassination in a country 3,000 miles from its borders, North Korea has demonstrated a new willingness to use its formidable arsenal of deadly toxins and poisons to kill or intimidate enemies on foreign soil, analysts say.

Seen in the light of North Korea’s recent flurry of provocative missiles tests, Kim Jong Nam’s killing now looks to many experts like a proving exercise for a weapons system — in this case, a robust chemical-weapons stockpile that Pyongyang is thought to have built over decades and kept carefully under wraps.

“The choice of weapons was not accidental,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former senior analyst on North Korea at the CIA and currently managing director for Korea at the Bower Group Asia. “Everything about this incident was intended to send a message.”

U.S. and South Korean intelligence agencies have long believed that North Korea possesses significant stores of the nerve agents VX and sarin — and probably biological weapons as well — but in the past, such arsenals were assumed to be intended as a deterrent against foreign attacks. But in the attack on Kim Jong Nam, North Korea revealed a strategy for using chemicals that looks a lot like ­cyberwarfare: limited, highly secretive attacks that can damage an enemy without inviting massive retaliation.

Whether Kim Jong Un would risk such an attack against a foreign government — even the United States — is unclear. But the February incident is a reminder that North Korea has options for striking targets abroad that do not hinge on the country’s ability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, current and former U.S. officials say.

“North Korea is bad enough when you’re talking about their nuclear and missiles program,” Rebecca Hersman, a former Defense Department deputy assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction, said at a recent policy forum. “But I think we ignore their chemical and biological programs truly at our own peril.”

Walking into a trap

Kim Jong Nam probably knew an attack was coming, though he might not have imagined where, or how.

The 45-year-old eldest son of dead North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had been living in exile in the Chinese province of Macau since 2003, and he had become a vocal critic of North Korea’s repressive communist government. He became a probable candidate for assassination after his younger half brother took control of the country in late 2011, claiming the job that had once been promised to him. His fate was likely sealed in 2013 when the newly installed leader ordered the execution of Jang Song Thaek, a prominent North Korean defense official and Kim Jong Nam’s uncle and longtime protector.

But when he strode into Kuala Lumpur’s KLIA2 airport with his light jacket and backpack on Feb. 13, he walked unknowingly into an exquisitely laid trap.

Not one, but two teams of assassins had rehearsed for the moment. The only ones Kim Jong Nam would see were female: two attractive women in their 20s who had been recruited locally. One of them, identified by police as Indonesian native Siti Aisyah, worked in a Kuala Lumpur massage parlor; the other, Doan Thi Huong, had moved from Vietnam to Malaysia to work in what authorities described vaguely as the “entertainment” industry.

Both would tell police that they were hired by a Korean man to perform “pranks,” such as smearing baby oil on strangers, for a hidden-camera video show. For their service, each was promised $90 in cash and a shot at future TV stardom.

But on Feb. 13, the surprise prepared for Kim Jong Nam was VX, not baby oil. In a sequence that would be captured on security-camera video and later broadcast around the world, Kim Jong Nam was accosted as he checked in for a flight in the airport’s departure lounge. A woman in a white sweatshirt is seen grabbing the North Korean’s face from behind. Although the images are unclear, police think the second woman helped smear the oily liquid over the victim’s cheeks.

At least four men — later identified by Malaysian officials as North Korean agents — are seen watching the attack and shadowing the visibly agitated Kim Jong Nam as he seeks help from police and an airport first-aid station. Minutes later, as the dying Kim is wheeled into an ambulance, the men slip through the departures gate to board flights out of the country.

The only ones who didn’t escape were the women and the victim himself. Aisyah and Huong mysteriously avoided serious injury — perhaps, weapons experts speculate, because each handled harmless precursor chemicals that became toxic only when mixed, or perhaps because both women quickly washed their hands after the attack.

Both are seen quickly entering airport lavatories after the attack, behavior that prosecutors have cited in accusing the two women of being knowingly complicit in Kim Jong Nam’s murder. The two women face court appearances later this month on charges of first-degree murder, a capital crime in Malaysia.

Kim Jong Nam, who quickly sought medical help after the attack, lost consciousness in the airport medical station and died in the ambulance, less than 20 minutes after the episode began.

It would take two autopsies and nearly two weeks to determine the name of the rare toxin that took his life. Malaysian investigators would conclude that the VX was smuggled into the country by North Korea, most likely in a commercial jetliner. It’s unclear whether the toxin arrived ready to use or in a form that required mixing two harmless ingredients to create. In either case, the advantage for the assassins is that only a few drops are needed to kill, said a U.S. official with years of experience in ­chemical-weapons defense.

“Was it assembled in Malaysia? Not necessarily,” said the official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing U.S. intelligence assessments of the North Korean threat. “A single three-ounce container that would fit in your carry-on luggage would hold far more than you’d ever need.”

Pyongyang’s stockpile

Until the Feb. 13 attack, hard evidence of Pyongyang’s arsenal of toxins did not exist, at least in the public realm. But for at least two decades, U.S. intelligence assessments have concluded that North Korea possesses a sizable stockpile of chemical weapons, with VX being one of many varieties.

A State Department report in 2001 found that North Korea was “already self-sufficient” in making all the necessary precursors for sarin and VX, as well as older weapons such as mustard gas. Drawing from an array of sources — from North Korean defectors and spies to satellite photos and electronic eavesdropping — U.S. agencies calculated the size of the country’s chemical stockpile at between 2,500 and 5,000 tons. That’s far larger than Syria’s arsenal at its peak, and larger than any known to exist in the world, except for those built by the Soviet and U.S. militaries during the Cold War.

A parallel but reportedly much smaller program produces biological weapons, current and former U.S. intelligence officials think. Published Defense Intelligence Agency documents have described efforts underway to weaponize at least four pathogens: anthrax, plague, cholera and biological toxins, such as botulinum.

Work on chemical and biological programs began years before Pyongyang tested its first nuclear bomb, and U.S. analysts suspect that both were intended at first as a deterrent against foreign attacks. But although North Korea regularly boasts of its achievements in atomic energy and missiles, its chemical and biological weapons have always been kept carefully hidden, according to a study released jointly last month by the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the U.S. Korea Institute.

“North Korea has deliberately built its NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] infrastructures in extreme secrecy; undertaken camouflage, concealment and deception operations . . . and dispersed NBC facilities around the country,” report author Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., a prominent expert on North Korean weapons systems, wrote in the report. “It is therefore probable that there are significant elements of the NBC programs and their infrastructures that are simply unknown outside the North Korean government.”

U.S. and South Korean defense officials alike take the threat seriously, so much so that both governments inoculate their troops against exposure to anthrax bacteria and even the smallpox virus. Soldiers deployed along the border are issued gas masks and protective suits and put through occasional drills to prepare for the day when canisters of VX or sarin are fired across the border in North Korean rockets or artillery shells.

Any such attack would certainly prompt a massive retaliation. But Kim Jong Nam’s assassination has forced U.S. officials to consider the possibility of a clandestine attack, one that might be more difficult to trace, or to defend against.

“With biological weapons, especially, there’s an opportunity for covert attack with deniability, since attribution would be difficult,” said Andrew C. Weber, former assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons defense. Although U.S. officials are fixated on North Korea’s nuclear advances, a nuclear attack “is not the most likely, or possibly even the most consequential,” he said.

As Kim Jong Nam’s assassination demonstrated, the delivery of such weapons can be easy — especially for deadly pathogens, but also for toxic chemicals, he said. And any military response would be delayed for days or weeks while investigators attempted to find evidence that firmly pointed to a perpetrator.

“A chemical attack would be knowable, almost as soon as it happens,” Weber said. “But Kim Jong Un is a brutal guy, and he may have no qualms against doing it. Or he may just miscalculate.”

Sending a message

Kim Jong Un’s plan to use VX to kill his half brother included extensive measures to ensure secrecy — so many, in fact, that some experts think the North Koreans wanted to keep their enemies ignorant about its use of the toxin, or at least unsure.

After Kim Jong Nam’s death, Pyongyang requested the immediate return of his body, without an autopsy being performed. Malaysia refused, and soon afterward, local news media reported an attempt by unknown individuals to break into the morgue where the body was kept. The attempt failed, but in the weeks since, North Korea has insisted that the leader’s half brother died of a heart attack and that any reports of chemical toxins were lies spread by outsiders.

Some longtime North Korea analysts are convinced that the killing was intended mostly as a warning to other members of the Kim family who might be plotting Kim Jong Un’s overthrow. The leader has a history of extreme brutality toward relatives whom he suspects of plotting against him. He may have seen Kim Jong Nam — a free-spoken man of leisure who enjoyed protected status in China and was widely reported to have intelligence contacts with several foreign governments — as a possible future choice by Beijing to replace him.

“It might have just been an expression of how much he hates traitors,” said Joshua Pollack, a former government consultant on North Korean weapons programs and now editor of the journal Nonproliferation Review. “There’s no doubt that VX was an unusual choice for an assassination. But I think it was probably chosen because they thought no one would look for it.”

Other current and former U.S. officials say that North Korea would have calculated that the VX would be found eventually. According to these officials, Kim Jong Un’s plan was to showcase his ability to strike with terrifying weapons, while also concealing the evidence to reduce the chances of retaliation.

“His message about VX was, ‘We have it,’ ” said Terry, the former CIA analyst. “He knew they would eventually find it.”

Whatever the motivation, the tactic worked on nearly every ­level, North Korea experts say: A potential rival was eliminated. A capability to strike covertly, using one of the most fearsome chemical weapons ever designed, was amply demonstrated. And North Korea, while issuing denials that are widely seen as implausible, managed to get away with it, at least until now.

“They carry out an attack and make people afraid, but then ensure that there’s no evidence that can lead to real accountability,” Pollack said. “For them, that’s the sweet spot.”

Every article I read about NK is scarier than the previous one.

OK, @GreyhoundFan, you sent my anxiety to DEF CON 5. Thank goodness tequila is on the way. Now we know how he controls his own people. But the potential here is terrifying. 

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

OK, @GreyhoundFan, you sent my anxiety to DEF CON 5. Thank goodness tequila is on the way. Now we know how he controls his own people. But the potential here is terrifying. 

Sorry @GrumpyGran, but I couldn't not share that article. I would love to have some tequila myself, but thanks to medication, I can't. Please have a shot or three for me. Better yet, a raspberry margarita!

[GreyhoundFan]

"How ‘isolated’ North Korea managed to build an ICBM that could reach Alaska"

Spoiler

North Korea is a country in isolation, a place where most citizens don't have access to the Internet or the means to travel abroad. In 2010, the New York Times described the country as a “ ‘hermit kingdom,’ so poor that there is almost no supply of concrete, bricks or window glass. People suffer shortages of rice, gasoline and even underwear.”

And yet. It’s been able to expand its weapons technology at an astounding rate. Earlier this week, it test-launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that experts say could have reached Alaska. How has the North been able to make big weaponry advances that experts considered a couple of years away at best?

The answer: North Korea has been developing its nuclear weapon systems expertise for decades. It boasts a cadre of well-trained scientists and engineers and a vast international financial network that's both supplied the necessary raw materials and funded a billion-dollar weapons development program. And it doesn’t hurt that Kim Jung Un has made the nuclear weapons program a top priority, orienting his entire country toward that goal.

“When you have a strategic line, a single-minded focus on nuclear and economic development, and you're able to politically mobilize and entire state infrastructure to that end, it provides a lot of potential momentum,” said Scott A. Snyder, a North Korea expert and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “That's what Kim Jung Un has done.”

When North Korea first launched its missile development program, its strategy was to buy old Soviet missiles from third parties such as Egypt and Syria, said John Schilling, a North Korea expert and aerospace engineer who contributes to 38 North, a website devoted to events concerning North Korea. Once the North Korean engineers had the old missiles, they reverse-engineered them so that they could produce their own copies.

The country imported experience too, Schilling says. As the Soviet Union neared collapse, North Korea hired Russian engineers who weren't being paid at home. It brought them to Pyongyang to both work directly on North Korean programs and train North Koreans.

North Korea also had relationships with Iran and Pakistan, Schilling said. “Initially, these seem to have been one-way affairs — North Korea sold Iran missiles to use in their war with Iraq, and Pakistan (or at least A.Q. Khan) sold nuclear technology to North Korea,” he wrote in an email. “But as all three nations developed their skills, this turned into more of an equal partnership with information and technology flowing between all three nations.” (Abdul Qadeer Khan is the founder of Pakistan’s uranium-enrichment program and has been accused of aiding the proliferation of nuclear weapons in other countries. )

At first, these efforts led to some trial and a lot of error. Not so anymore. Today, the regime is “much more efficient and effective” at producing weapons in-house, said Ken Gause, a North Korea expert at the Center for Naval Analyses. “They're not making the same mistakes over and over again.”

Indeed, Schilling said that North Korea is mostly able to build its rockets in-house. “They do still need to import some specialized parts and components, particularly electronics, but this is done mostly on a black- or grey-market basis,” he wrote. And it's not hard. “It doesn't need to be done on a large scale, and it doesn't need anyone else's active collaboration, so it would be very difficult to stop,” he said.

The country's speedy weapons development in the past few years, Snyder said, can be attributed to Kim.

Kim Jung Il, Kim’s father, initially developed the nuclear weapons program. But it wasn't an overriding priority, Snyder says, and it moved at a “plodding pace.” When the younger Kim assumed power, Snyder said he “stepped on the gas pedal,” making missile development his top priority. That’s in part a political calculation — Kim was young when he took over the country, and untested. The program was a source of domestic legitimization. It also helped Kim counter the perception that North Korea is vulnerable internationally, a weak state surrounded by strong states.

Kim sees an ability to strike with nuclear weapons as the key to his legitimacy. All of which makes slowing the program down at this point a nearly impossible aim. “If North Korea wants a nuclear program, North Korea is gonna get one,” Gause said. “And we’re gonna have to live with it.”

Of course, there are still some hurdles the country needs to overcome.

Right now, its strongest warhead can detonate at about 20 kilotons, similar to the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Reaching the abilities of an American missile warhead (which yield 100 to 475 kilotons) will require “fundamentally new designs,” Schilling said. That's still a couple of years away, he predicts.

The country has also so far failed to show that it can fit a nuclear warhead into a missile. But that doesn’t bring Schilling much comfort.

“Every nation with North Korea’s level of demonstrated expertise in nuclear weapons development has at least been able to fit their low-yield nuclear warheads into missiles,” he wrote. North Korea has published mock-ups of how it would do it, and Schilling calls them “plausible.” He also notes that very few countries have actually demonstrated that their missiles and warheads work together. 

Even the United States and Russia have done it only a handful of times. “Mostly, nations test their missiles and warheads separately and trust that they will work when brought together,” he wrote. “If the North Koreans felt compelled to put one of their warheads on one of their missiles and fire it tomorrow, odds are it would work.”

NK, Iran, and Pakistan working together -- the news just gets scarier and scarier.

[milkteeth]

On 7/7/2017 at 7:06 AM, laPapessaGiovanna said:

This op-ed about North Korea is very interesting, a must read imho

What if North Korea isn't crazy?

  Reveal hidden contents

Look at the world from North Korea’s perspective. The regime saw the collapse of the Soviet empire and an even more unsettling transformation in China, which went from being a fiery ideological soul mate to a pragmatic trading state that has eagerly integrated into world markets. These days, Beijing seems to view Pyongyang as a nuisance, and China now often votes to condemn and place sanctions against North Korea at the United Nations.

And the world’s most powerful country has made clear that North Korea is destined for the ash heap of history. After 9/11, when the United States was attacked by Islamist terrorists emanating from the Middle East, President George W. Bush announced that the United States would no longer tolerate an “axis of evil” comprising Iraq, Iran — and North Korea. It invaded Iraq. Current U.S. policy toward Iran, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently said, is to “work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.” And regarding North Korea, President Trump wants China to “end this nonsense once and for all,” which again can only mean getting rid of the Kim government in some way.

So, the North Korean regime has tried to buy insurance. And in the realm of international affairs, the best insurance is having a nuclear capacity. Pyongyang knows that it has a large-enough army and the Korean theater of war is so small and dense that a conventional war would be unthinkable, producing hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of refugees pouring into China and South Korea. North Korea has accurately calculated that China and South Korea are more terrified of the chaos that would follow its collapse than of its nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps the right way to look at North Korea is as a smart, rational, calculating government that is functioning shrewdly given its priority of regime survival. More pressure only strengthens its resolve to buy even more insurance. How to handle it under these circumstances?

The first way to break the logjam in U.S. policy would be to persuade China to put real pressure on its ally. That won’t happen by serving President Xi Jinping chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago. Beijing faces an understandable nightmare — under sanctions and pressure, North Korea collapses and the newly unified country becomes a giant version of South Korea, with a defense treaty with Washington, nearly 30,000 American troops and possibly dozens of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons — all on China’s border.

Washington will have to promise Beijing now that in the event of unification, it would withdraw its troops, change the nature of its treaty relationship with the new Korea and, working with China, eliminate Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

But pressure will work only if there is also some reason for North Korea to make concessions. Pyongyang has indicated in the past that it seeks a formal end to the Korean War (Washington signed only an armistice in 1953), a recognition of the regime and the lifting of sanctions. Obviously none of this should be offered right now, but there is no harm in talking to Pyongyang and searching for ways to trade some of these concessions for the complete eradication of the nuclear program.

It’s a bitter pill for Washington to swallow, but the alternative is to hope that China will act against its interests and crush its ally, or that North Korea will finally collapse. But hope is not a strategy.

Can you imagine Trump actually negotiating? Me neither. He'd need to be smart. Un seems deadbent on keeping his power over North Korea. But he must know that if North Korea is wiped away by nuclear war he won't be dictator supreme anymore. Is it bad that my hopes rest on a crazy dictator's sanity?

While Kim Jong Un might be "crazy", he isn't suicidal. North Korea would go down more quickly than Iraq the second the US decided to cross the DMZ. It makes sense for Un to seek nuclear weapons as there have been many object lessons in the past few years about what happens to you if you don't have one and the US decides in time for regime change. 

 

However, having any more nuclear weapons in the world is a terrible thing. Considering the fairly frequent equipment failures that they have, we can only hope that they have a North Korean Stanislav Petrov behind the red button.

Quote

On September 26, 1983, just three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm,[3] and his decision is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.[4]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I met a friend for lunch today. The restaurant had Faux News on and they kept repeating this story. I was alternating between being angry and being scared. "North Korea now making missile-ready nuclear weapons, U.S. analysts say"

Spoiler

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power, U.S. intelligence officials have concluded in a confidential assessment.

The new analysis completed last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency comes on the heels of another intelligence assessment that sharply raises the official estimate for the total number of bombs in the communist country’s atomic arsenal. The U.S. calculated last month that up to 60 nuclear weapons are now controlled by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Some independent experts believe the number of bombs is much smaller.

The findings are likely to deepen concerns about an evolving North Korean military threat that appears to be advancing far more rapidly than many experts had predicted. U.S. officials last month concluded that Pyongyang is also outpacing expectations in its effort to build an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking cities on the American mainland.

While more than a decade has passed since North Korea’s first nuclear detonation, many analysts believed it would be years before the country’s weapons scientists could design a compact warhead that could be delivered by missile to distant targets. But the new assessment, a summary document dated July 28, concludes that this critical milestone has already been reached.

...

“The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. The assessment’s broad conclusions were verified by two U.S. officials familiar with the document. It is not yet known whether the reclusive regime has successfully tested the smaller design, although North Korea officially last year claimed to have done so.

The DIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

An assessment this week by the Japanese Ministry of Defense also concludes there is evidence to suggest that North Korea has achieved miniaturization.

Kim Jong Un is becoming increasingly confident in the reliability of his nuclear arsenal, analysts have concluded, explaining perhaps the dictator’s willingness to engage in defiant behavior, including missile tests that have drawn criticism even from North Korea’s closest ally, China. On Saturday, both China and Russia joined other members of the U.N. Security Council in approving punishing new economic sanctions, including a ban on exports that supply up to a third of North Korea’s annual $3 billion earnings.

The nuclear progress further raises the stakes for President Trump, who has vowed that North Korea will never be allowed to threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Saturday on MSNBC’s Hugh Hewitt Show, national security adviser H.R. McMaster said the prospect of a North Korea armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs would be “intolerable, from the president’s perspective.”

“We have to provide all options . . . and that includes a military option,” he said. But McMaster said the administration would do everything short of war to “pressure Kim Jong Un and those around him, such that they conclude it is in their interest to denuclearize.” The options said to be under discussion ranged from new multilateral negotiations to reintroducing U.S. battlefield nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula, officials familiar with internal discussions said.

...

Determining the precise makeup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal has long been a difficult challenge for intelligence professionals because of the regime’s culture of extreme secrecy and insularity. The country’s weapons scientists have conducted five nuclear tests since 2006, the latest being a 20- to 30-kiloton detonation on Sept. 9, 2016, that produced a blast estimated to be up to twice that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

But producing a compact nuclear warhead that can fit inside a missile is a technically demanding feat, one that many analysts believed was still beyond North Korea’s grasp. Last year, state-run media in Pyongyang displayed a spherical device that government spokesmen described as a miniaturized nuclear warhead, but whether it was a real bomb remained unclear. North Korean officials described the September detonation as a successful test of a small warhead designed to fit on a missile, though many experts were skeptical of the claim.

Kim has repeatedly proclaimed his intention to field a fleet of nuclear-tipped ICBMs as a guarantor of his regime’s survival. His regime took a major step toward that goal last month with the first successful tests of a missile with intercontinental range. Video analysis of the latest test revealed that the missile caught fire and apparently disintegrated as it plunged back toward Earth’s surface, suggesting North Korea’s engineers are not yet capable of building a reentry vehicle that can carry the warhead safely through the upper atmosphere. But U.S. analysts and many independent experts believe that this hurdle will be overcome by late next year.

“What initially looked like a slow-motion Cuban missile crisis is now looking more like the Manhattan Project, just barreling along,” said Robert Litwak, a nonproliferation expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and author of “Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” published by the center this year. “There’s a sense of urgency behind the program that is new to the Kim Jong Un era.”

While few discount North Korea’s progress, some prominent U.S. experts warned against the danger of overestimating the threat. Siegfried Hecker, director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the last known U.S. official to personally inspect North Korea’s nuclear facilities, has calculated the size of North Korea’s arsenal at no more than 20 to 25 bombs. Hecker warned of potential risks that can come from making Kim into a bigger menace than he actually is.

“Overselling is particularly dangerous,” said Hecker, who visited North Korea seven times between 2004 and 2010 and met with key leaders of the country’s weapons programs. “Some like to depict Kim as being crazy — a madman — and that makes the public believe that the guy is undeterrable. He’s not crazy and he’s not suicidal. And he’s not even unpredictable.”

“The real threat,” Hecker said, “is we’re going to stumble into a nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.”

In the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have occasionally overestimated the North Korean threat. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush administration assessed that Pyongyang was close to developing an ICBM that could strike the U.S. mainland — a prediction that missed the mark by more than a decade. More recently, however, analysts and policymakers have been taken repeatedly by surprise as North Korea achieved key milestones months or years ahead of schedule, noted Jeffrey Lewis, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies’ East Asia Nonproliferation Program. There was similar skepticism about China’s capabilities in the early 1960s, said Lewis, who has studied that country’s pathway to a successful nuclear test in 1964.

“There is no reason to think that the North Koreans aren’t making the same progress after so many successful nuclear explosions,” Lewis said. “The big question is why do we hold the North Koreans to a different standard than we held [Joseph] Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China? North Korea is testing underground, so we’re always going to lack a lot of details. But it seems to me a lot of people are insisting on impossible levels of proof because they simply don’t want to accept what should be pretty obvious.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S."

Spoiler

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump threatened on Tuesday to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States as tensions with the isolated nuclear-armed state grow into perhaps the most serious foreign policy challenge yet in his young administration.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

The president’s comments came as North Korea earlier in the day escalated its criticism of the United States, as well as its neighboring allies, by warning that it will mobilize all its resources to take “physical action” in retaliation against the latest round of United Nations sanctions.

The statement, carried by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, was the strongest indication yet that the country could conduct another nuclear or missile test, as it had often done in response to past United Nations sanctions. Until now, the North’s response to the latest sanctions had been limited to strident yet vague warnings, such as threatening retaliation “thousands of times over.”

“Packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation,” the North Korean statement said. “They should be mindful that the D.P.R.K.’s strategic steps accompanied by physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”

D.P.R.K. stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea’s statement on Tuesday appeared to defy efforts by both Washington and Beijing to defuse the tense situation.

On Monday, while attending a regional security meeting of foreign ministers in Manila, the United States’ secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, kept the door open for talks with North Korea, suggesting that the country should stop its recent string of missile launches to set the stage for negotiations over its weapons programs. At the same venue, Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China said he told his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, that the North should stop carrying out nuclear and missile tests.

Incensed by the North’s two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month, the United Nations Security Council adopted a new sanctions resolution over the weekend, the eighth since the country conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Backers of the resolution said the new sanctions would cut North Korea’s meager annual export revenue by about a third, impeding its ability to raise cash for its weapons programs.

President Trump praised the sanctions in a tweet on Tuesday morning. “After many years of failure, countries are coming together to finally address the dangers posed by North Korea,” he said. “We must be tough & decisive!”

The sanctions ban member countries from importing coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore and seafood from North Korea. They also prohibit member nations from hosting any additional workers from the North above their current levels. Washington called the restrictions “the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation.”

But strong doubts remain over how rigorously China and Russia, the North’s two neighboring allies, will enforce the sanctions.

The sanctions also do not impair the North’s ability to import oil and export clothing and textiles that its workers produce for Chinese companies, although the sanctions ban new joint ventures with North Korea and any new investment in current joint ventures. Clothing and textile exports are a leading source of foreign currency for the impoverished country.

Officials and analysts still doubt that North Korea has mastered the technology needed to deliver a nuclear payload on an intercontinental ballistic missile. But its last ICBM test, conducted on July 28, alarmed Washington and its allies by demonstrating that missiles now could potentially reach much the continental United States.

“North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles and its nuclear program are becoming increasingly real and imminent problems for the Asia-Pacific region including Japan, as well as the rest of the world,” the Japanese government said in an annual threat assessment released on Tuesday. “It is possible that North Korea has already achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and has acquired nuclear warheads.”

One of the last technical hurdles North Korea must clear is mastering the “re-entry” know-how to protect a small nuclear warhead as the missile crashes through the earth’s atmosphere.

The North’s fast-advancing missile capabilities have left its neighbors South Korea and Japan scrambling for ways to protect themselves. South Korea is racing to build up its monitoring and striking capabilities so that its radars and reconnaissance planes can track and neutralize North Korean missiles in pre-emptive attacks.

In March, a group of Japanese governing party lawmakers led by Itsunori Onodera, who became Japan’s new defense minister on Thursday, urged Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to consider acquiring the capability to hit enemy bases in what would be a drastic change in the country’s post-World War II pacifist defense posture, Reuters reported on Tuesday. Tokyo has so far avoided taking the controversial and costly step of acquiring bombers or cruise missiles with enough range to strike other countries.

“North Korea’s missile launches have escalated tensions both in terms of quality and quantity. I would like to study if our current missile defense is sufficient just with the Aegis destroyers and PAC-3,” the surface-to-air missile interceptors, Mr. Onodera said on Friday, according to The Associated Press.

In South Korea, some conservative politicians and analysts are calling for the reintroduction of American tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea to establish a “balance of terror” against the North. The United States withdrew all nuclear weapons from the South in the early 1990s, though it occasionally sends nuclear-capable bombers and submarines here in exercises.

On Tuesday, North Korea barely held back its disdain for its traditional allies, China and Russia, for acquiescing to American pressure to impose tougher sanctions.

“The recent sanctions resolution cooked up by the U.S. and its followers is an outcome of the horror and uneasiness of the U.S. taken aback by the might and mettle of the D.P.R.K.,” its statement said. “It is also the label of the weakness and servility of the riffraff who showed their hands in favor of adopting the resolution, as they are scared by the U.S.”

The statement did not mention China or Russia by name, only referring to “big countries” that it said abandoned their “creed, conscience and obligation” and voted for the sanctions to gain favor with President Trump.

 

[GrumpyGran]

32 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

“They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

So I guess he watched a Marvel superheros movie with the grandkids yesterday afternoon while it was raining. How hard would it be to arrange for someone to "accidentally" hit him in the head with a golf shot?

[nvmbr02]

3 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sigh: "Trump Threatens ‘Fire and Fury’ Against North Korea if It Endangers U.S."

  Reveal hidden contents

BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — President Trump threatened on Tuesday to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States as tensions with the isolated nuclear-armed state grow into perhaps the most serious foreign policy challenge yet in his young administration.

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Mr. Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

The president’s comments came as North Korea earlier in the day escalated its criticism of the United States, as well as its neighboring allies, by warning that it will mobilize all its resources to take “physical action” in retaliation against the latest round of United Nations sanctions.

The statement, carried by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency, was the strongest indication yet that the country could conduct another nuclear or missile test, as it had often done in response to past United Nations sanctions. Until now, the North’s response to the latest sanctions had been limited to strident yet vague warnings, such as threatening retaliation “thousands of times over.”

“Packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation,” the North Korean statement said. “They should be mindful that the D.P.R.K.’s strategic steps accompanied by physical action will be taken mercilessly with the mobilization of all its national strength.”

D.P.R.K. stands for the North’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

North Korea’s statement on Tuesday appeared to defy efforts by both Washington and Beijing to defuse the tense situation.

On Monday, while attending a regional security meeting of foreign ministers in Manila, the United States’ secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, kept the door open for talks with North Korea, suggesting that the country should stop its recent string of missile launches to set the stage for negotiations over its weapons programs. At the same venue, Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China said he told his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho, that the North should stop carrying out nuclear and missile tests.

Incensed by the North’s two intercontinental ballistic missile tests last month, the United Nations Security Council adopted a new sanctions resolution over the weekend, the eighth since the country conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Backers of the resolution said the new sanctions would cut North Korea’s meager annual export revenue by about a third, impeding its ability to raise cash for its weapons programs.

President Trump praised the sanctions in a tweet on Tuesday morning. “After many years of failure, countries are coming together to finally address the dangers posed by North Korea,” he said. “We must be tough & decisive!”

The sanctions ban member countries from importing coal, iron, iron ore, lead, lead ore and seafood from North Korea. They also prohibit member nations from hosting any additional workers from the North above their current levels. Washington called the restrictions “the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation.”

But strong doubts remain over how rigorously China and Russia, the North’s two neighboring allies, will enforce the sanctions.

The sanctions also do not impair the North’s ability to import oil and export clothing and textiles that its workers produce for Chinese companies, although the sanctions ban new joint ventures with North Korea and any new investment in current joint ventures. Clothing and textile exports are a leading source of foreign currency for the impoverished country.

Officials and analysts still doubt that North Korea has mastered the technology needed to deliver a nuclear payload on an intercontinental ballistic missile. But its last ICBM test, conducted on July 28, alarmed Washington and its allies by demonstrating that missiles now could potentially reach much the continental United States.

“North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles and its nuclear program are becoming increasingly real and imminent problems for the Asia-Pacific region including Japan, as well as the rest of the world,” the Japanese government said in an annual threat assessment released on Tuesday. “It is possible that North Korea has already achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and has acquired nuclear warheads.”

One of the last technical hurdles North Korea must clear is mastering the “re-entry” know-how to protect a small nuclear warhead as the missile crashes through the earth’s atmosphere.

The North’s fast-advancing missile capabilities have left its neighbors South Korea and Japan scrambling for ways to protect themselves. South Korea is racing to build up its monitoring and striking capabilities so that its radars and reconnaissance planes can track and neutralize North Korean missiles in pre-emptive attacks.

In March, a group of Japanese governing party lawmakers led by Itsunori Onodera, who became Japan’s new defense minister on Thursday, urged Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to consider acquiring the capability to hit enemy bases in what would be a drastic change in the country’s post-World War II pacifist defense posture, Reuters reported on Tuesday. Tokyo has so far avoided taking the controversial and costly step of acquiring bombers or cruise missiles with enough range to strike other countries.

“North Korea’s missile launches have escalated tensions both in terms of quality and quantity. I would like to study if our current missile defense is sufficient just with the Aegis destroyers and PAC-3,” the surface-to-air missile interceptors, Mr. Onodera said on Friday, according to The Associated Press.

In South Korea, some conservative politicians and analysts are calling for the reintroduction of American tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea to establish a “balance of terror” against the North. The United States withdrew all nuclear weapons from the South in the early 1990s, though it occasionally sends nuclear-capable bombers and submarines here in exercises.

On Tuesday, North Korea barely held back its disdain for its traditional allies, China and Russia, for acquiescing to American pressure to impose tougher sanctions.

“The recent sanctions resolution cooked up by the U.S. and its followers is an outcome of the horror and uneasiness of the U.S. taken aback by the might and mettle of the D.P.R.K.,” its statement said. “It is also the label of the weakness and servility of the riffraff who showed their hands in favor of adopting the resolution, as they are scared by the U.S.”

The statement did not mention China or Russia by name, only referring to “big countries” that it said abandoned their “creed, conscience and obligation” and voted for the sanctions to gain favor with President Trump.

 

A quote from 2013... TT once again proves there is a quote for everything. 

 

With the threats from TT there are also threats from N. Korea. I live on Guam, so that makes me a bit uneasy, though it isn't the first time such a threat has been made, it is the first time since we moved here a year ago. No signs of anything being different around here though so I am trying to not get myself freaked out. Since it is all over the news though keeping the kids away from it isn't easy. Plus I know my family back home is worried too.

North Korea threatens strike on Guam

Edited August 9, 2017 by nvmbr02

[GreyhoundFan]

Wow @nvmbr02, I'm sure you and your family are worried. I'd say to stay safe, but with the toddlers in charge on both sides, your hands are tied.

 

Way too much to quote, but this is a good one from the WaPo: "North Korea madness breaks out on ‘Fox & Friends’"

[nvmbr02]

20 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Wow @nvmbr02, I'm sure you and your family are worried. I'd say to stay safe, but with the toddlers in charge on both sides, your hands are tied.

 

Thank you.  Honestly, we are better off than most of the people here. We have the money to leave if we feel we need to and places to go. Not everyone has that.  I think the hardest part is that the threats from N. Korea specifically mention Andersen AFB. My kids go to school on base there and school is getting ready to start soon. There is something particularly unnerving about your child's school being threatened by a hostile government. 

Thanks for letting me vent a little on here! I don't want my kids to know I am a little worried. No point in alerting them more than they already are. I just need to take a deep breath and remember there is still 3 weeks before schools starts. Things can calm down before then and if they don't we do not have to send them to school, we do have other options.

[GreyhoundFan]

"North Korea just called Trump’s bluff. So what happens now?"

Spoiler

Yesterday, President Trump took a break from his 17-day vacation to threaten North Korea. His words:

North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. And as I said, they will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.

This threat was a response to a continuing series of provocations by North Korea. However, it only took a couple of hours for North Korea to respond — by escalating their threats. North Korea’s official news agency reported a couple of hours later that Pyongyang was “threatening” missile strikes near Guam, where the U.S. has several military bases.

This faces the U.S. with a problem. U.S. leaders have traditionally been careful with their language, especially when dealing with nuclear powers, and for good reason. If the U.S. cares about its credibility, then it only wants to make threats that it will deliver on. Now, North Korea has effectively called Trump’s bluff. If the U.S. responds as Trump has promised, it will mark a very dangerous escalation. If the U.S. does not respond, then Trump’s credibility — and perhaps U.S. credibility — will be damaged.

Escalation can be a very bad thing

Nuclear weapons are the most devastating kinetic weapons known to man. While fears of a mutual conflagration that would destroy human life on this planet have diminished, even a limited nuclear war could cause millions of human deaths.

Fears of all-out nuclear war dominated the historical relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Both sides faced the temptation of brinkmanship — pushing to the very edge of open hostility to extract concessions from the other.

But brinkmanship is a dangerous game. If you miscalculate your threats or misunderstand the other side’s motivations, you might leave the other side with no choice but to respond aggressively. This might lead to a war of mutually assured destruction that neither side wants but neither side can avoid.

The Cuban missile crisis was a classic example of brinkmanship, in which mutually escalating threats between the United States and the Soviet Union nearly led to war. Had things gone a little differently, the world might have seen a devastating nuclear conflict. The near miss helped provoke serious rethinking on both sides about how they could manage their many conflicts of interest without outright war.

Nuclear weapons led to concerns about credibility and deterrence

After the crisis, U.S. (and eventually U.S.S.R.) strategic thinkers, such as Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, started to radically rethink the politics of conflict. The U.S. and Soviet Union were deeply hostile to each other — but neither wanted a war, and both wanted to avoid the mistakes that might accidentally precipitate one. This is what produced the Cold War, a kind of shadow conflict in which the two countries jockeyed for advantage through proxy conflicts and other means, without ever engaging in direct and open conflict.

The Cold War happened in the shadow of the hot war involving nuclear weapons that was never actually fought. Each side looked to use implicit or explicit threats to deter the other from doing things it didn’t want it to do, outlining the consequences if their adversaries went ahead.

To be effective, such threats had to be credible. The other side had to believe that the threat would be delivered on, even if it had painful consequences for the threatening party. This meant that leaders — even when they were vociferous in other ways — were extremely careful about even implicit threats of military action against another nuclear power. They feared that if their bluff was called, they would either have to deliver on the threat, risking nuclear conflagration, or face the risk that their adversaries would not believe in their threats in future, greatly damaging their ability to influence their adversaries’ actions.

This is the dilemma that Trump has created

Trump threatened “fire and fury” and “power” against North Korea in a classic example of brinkmanship. Trump is not noted for clarity of language, or for command of the subtleties of international politics, and the threat is rather fuzzily worded. Still, its plain-language meaning would suggest that Trump told North Korea that if it issued any further threats of any sort to the United States, it would suffer dire military consequences. North Korea seems to have decided that Trump’s threat was unbelievable.

This is unsurprising — there are a number of reasons North Korea might have calculated that Trump was bluffing.

First, a threat of massive military retaliation might seem a disproportionate response to political rhetoric, however threatening. After all, the United States has tolerated — and mostly ignored — bellicose rhetoric from North Korea for decades. North Korea, which has little credibility in international politics, doesn’t have to watch its words as the U.S. does, and has regularly threatened other countries, without delivering on its threats.

Second, if the United States decides to go to war against North Korea, the country can retaliate. At a minimum, it can use conventional artillery to devastate Seoul and much of the rest of South Korea, which is an important political ally, and it can always threaten to escalate to nuclear warheads.

Third, North Korea may believe that it can count on the support of China — which is a genuinely formidable power — in a military crisis. Finally, while North Korea has few friends, Trump is a weak U.S. leader who may have difficulty in getting support from key allies.

So what happens now?

The U.S. is now in a difficult situation of Trump’s making. It will be highly costly, and possibly greatly damaging to the United States to deliver on Trump’s threat, even in its minimal form. There is furthermore a significant risk that a spiral of threat and counterthreat might lead to actual nuclear war, which would have devastating consequences.

Yet if Trump, as is more likely, fails to deliver on the threat, then Trump’s credibility, such as it is, will be badly damaged, as might the credibility of the United States in future standoffs. In particular, it will be even harder to influence North Korea’s behavior.

International relations scholars disagree about the extent to which credibility carries across time, issue areas and relationships with different states. Perhaps other states will see the Trump administration, which has behaved in unprecedented ways, as a temporary aberration, and not draw any long-term conclusions about U.S. strength and willingness to live up to its commitments. Or perhaps not.

What a sobering analysis.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Quote

Now, North Korea has effectively called Trump’s bluff. If the U.S. responds as Trump has promised, it will mark a very dangerous escalation. If the U.S. does not respond, then Trump’s credibility — and perhaps U.S. credibility — will be damaged.

 they're joking right? USA's credibility never really recovered after GWB presidency ( non existent WMD anyone? not to name two lost wars and a devastating economic crisis) despite Obama's mighty efforts (undermined by a internal very vocal opposition who shouted from every rooftop that he was too soft and that he always got the shorter end in international deals) and Trump's credibility...well that's an oxymoron right? We all know it never existed to begin with.

 

[GrumpyGran]

@nvmbr02, just came to add my voice of support. Not much else I can do.  Praying for you and everyone else there. And that someone will "accidently" get his hand stuck in a blender. Twice.

[Childless]

2 hours ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

 they're joking right? USA's credibility never really recovered after GWB presidency ( non existent WMD anyone? not to name two lost wars and a devastating economic crisis) despite Obama's mighty efforts (undermined by a internal very vocal opposition who shouted from every rooftop that he was too soft and that he always got the shorter end in international deals) and Trump's credibility...well that's an oxymoron right? We all know it never existed to begin with.

 

Please.  Trump can easily choose not to respond.  Despite all the audio, video, and tweets, he and his minions will simply go on camera and say he never implied any such thing as if none of the last few days even happened and his supporters will not only believe him, but also back him up when anyone produces proof to the contrary.  As for what others in the world think, Trump hasn't really given a rat's ass what they think up to this point, so why would he start now?

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo: "Rex Tillerson just erased the reckless red line Trump drew on North Korea"

Spoiler

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday morning defended President Trump’s reckless threat to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea, but make no mistake: In the course of doing so, Tillerson quietly erased the red line that Trump laid down, and redrew it in a relatively more reasonable place.

Tillerson’s comments will in this sense have a calming effect. But they are also cause for a different sort of alarm: They raise additional questions as to why Trump made the comments in the first place; what process went into the creation and delivery of them, if any; and what will — or won’t — be done to ensure that there is a sane process in place to shape further comments from Trump as this crisis unfolds.

Tillerson, returning from Asia, defended Trump’s comments this way:

“What the president is doing is sending a strong message to North Korea in language that Kim Jong Un would understand, because he doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language … I think it was important that he deliver that message to avoid any miscalculation on their part.”

In this sense, Tillerson stood by Trump’s threat. But Tillerson also sought to reassure Americans by saying this:

“I think what the president was just reaffirming is that the United States has the capability to fully defend itself from any attack, and our allies, and we will do so. So the American people should sleep well at night.”

Tillerson also said “the president just wanted to be clear to the North Korean regime that the U.S. has the unquestionable ability to defend itself … and its allies.” But that subtly — and meaningfully — shifts the red line Trump drew.

Trump, recall, said this Tuesday: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Trump then once again alluded to Kim Jong Un’s threats, and reiterated that they “will be met with fire, fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

In other words, Trump clearly stated — twice — that any further threats from North Korea would be met with a response that dwarfs any show of military power ever seen in human history, including, presumably, America’s dropping of nuclear bombs on Japan. Anything Trump does, or threatens to do, will be bigger and stronger than what came before it, including nuclear annihilation.

But Tillerson backed off of that. He recast Trump’s comments to mean that we will respond to defend ourselves from any attack, not respond with force to any further threats. (Indeed, North Korea crossed the red line Trump drew only hours later.)

“Tillerson has drawn the line in a more traditional and reasonable place,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear nonproliferation expert who tweets as ArmsControlWonk, told me Wednesday. “The question is: What did Trump think he was saying? My guess is he didn’t think about it at all. That’s the problem. … He doesn’t pay any attention to word choice.”

As many have already observed, by vaguely vowing an overwhelming nuclear response to continued threats from North Korea, Trump sounded a lot like North Korea itself, employing a formulation that is both vague and menacing, which in combination increases the risk of miscalculation and, with it, unspeakable horror. Tillerson plainly tried to undo that Wednesday by redrawing the line more sharply, while defending the impulse behind Trump’s comments.

But that still leaves us guessing in a way that raises worrisome unknowns about what’s to come. We don’t know what Trump really meant. What has now been confirmed, however, is that Trump will use vague and reckless language in the most dangerous conceivable contexts. “If one had any doubt that Trump was going to be incredibly reckless with language at the worst possible times, he just did it,” Lewis said. “Tillerson’s efforts suggest that everyone around Trump knows that was crazy.”

But that raises an additional question: What process went into the creation and delivery of this statement in the first place? Michael Warren of the Weekly Standard suggested Wednesday morning that the White House, including Trump’s national security team, was not aware that Trump was going to deliver this statement. And the New York Times adds, alarmingly, that “White House officials did not respond to questions about how much planning went into his brief statement.”

This urgently needs to be teased out. We need to know more about the process, if any, that went into the creation of this statement, and we’ll need to know more about this process going forward, as Trump delivers more similar statements in what looks like an escalating situation.

“No administration is of one mind on anything, so process determines how different preferences are aggregated together in presidential statements,” Lewis says. “Trump doesn’t choose words with any care whatsoever. If you don’t understand the process, you’re not going to understand what’s been agreed to … by broad inter-agency agreement.” Or if there was any such process at all.

UPDATE: The New York Times has now confirmed that Trump improvised his “fire and fury” threat, with no input from top national security advisers. Which should only exacerbate the process fears discussed above.

* NORTH KOREA RESPONDS: After Trump vowed that any further threats from North Korea would be met with “fire and fury,” North Korea responded with a statement:

Undaunted, North Korea warned several hours later that it was considering a strike that would create “an enveloping fire” around Guam, the western Pacific island where the United States operates a critical Air Force base … “The U.S. should clearly face up to the fact that the ballistic rockets of the Strategic Force of the [North’s Korean People’s Army] are now on constant standby, facing the Pacific Ocean and pay deep attention to their azimuth angle for launch,” the statement said.

That means North Korea has already crossed Trump’s red line.

* HOW MUCH PLANNING WENT INTO TRUMP’S STATEMENT? The New York Times’s Julie Davis points out that Trump’s “fire and fury” lines carried echoes of President Harry Truman’s comments after a nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Note this:

It is not clear whether Mr. Trump intended the historical parallel … but it was a stark break with decades of more measured presidential responses to brewing foreign conflicts.

“It’s hard to think of a president using more extreme language during crisis like this before,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian. “Presidents usually try to use language that is even more moderate than what they may be feeling in private, because they’ve always been worried that their language might escalate a crisis.”

As we mentioned above, what went into this statement is something that urgently needs to be teased out by more reporting.

...

* TRUMP’S COMMENTS COULD EASILY PROVOKE AN OVERREACTION: The Post editorial board asks what might happen if Kim Jong Un takes Trump’s “fire and fury” threat seriously:

Mr. Trump’s threat of “fire and fury” may sound like hype to American ears, but the words could be heard quite differently by others, such as Mr. Kim, the belligerent leader of a nuclear North Korea. Mr. Trump’s language could easily be misunderstood — he didn’t say precisely what would lead to “fire and fury” except for North Korea’s “threats”— and the upshot could be miscalculation or, heaven forbid, the kind of accidental entry into conflict that has haunted the globe since the dawn of the atomic age.

There is a great deal of commentary about what Trump intended or meant, but how Trump’s words might be received, irrespective of intent, also matters in evaluating their wisdom.

...

I hope the author is correct and that KJU takes Tillerson's words to heart.

[sawasdee]

27 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

What has now been confirmed, however, is that Trump will use vague and reckless language in the most dangerous conceivable contexts. “If one had any doubt that Trump was going to be incredibly reckless with language at the worst possible times, he just did it,” Lewis said. “Tillerson’s efforts suggest that everyone around Trump knows that was crazy.

For the sake of the world, someone has to restrain this man. Congress needs to acknowledge its duty to the nation and the world, and not cling to partisan politics. It must  either impeach, or encourage the implementation of the 25th Amendment. Just as was warned during the run up to the election, he hasn't the temperament, knowledge or intelligence to be president.

He's endangering not just the US and the Korean peninsula, but the entire world. And we didn't have a vote.

[sawasdee]

The last sentence of this left me speechless. The rest just truly angered me.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/08/09/at-a-time-like-this-trumps-team-sure-seems-heaven-sent/?utm_term=.23376dcde8f4

Spoiler

War clouds are gathering over the Korean Peninsula, and we are reminded of what former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld (almost) famously said: “You go to war with the president you have, not the president you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

President Trump probably possesses the raw will to launch an attack that will leave North Korea smoldering. The U.S. military knows what capabilities it has, and it can present options to the president. Picking from that menu once all else has failed is, in some ways, the easy part. The question is whether the president and his team are up to the task at hand beyond the actual military strike. Does the president have the diplomatic, communications and organizational skills to achieve the best outcome and avoid a war or to avoid the worst outcome after a war? To understand the stakes involved, read David Ignatius’s sobering overview in today’s Post. He states, “Among the clearest points of consensus among former officials was that the North Korea crisis provides what one participant [of the Aspen Strategy Group’s annual gathering] called a ‘catalytic’ moment.”

"Suffice it to say, there are very few who wish we had Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry or national security adviser Susan Rice back in charge" - WRONG!!! For most of us, that would be a consummation devoutly to be wished!

Sorry - I screwed up the quote and spoiler boxes , and have no idea how to fix it.

Edited August 9, 2017 by Coconut Flan
Repaired/deleted extra boxes.

[sawasdee]

Wasn't sure where to post this - and sorry for triple posting!

But am I remembering correctly, that after Nuremberg and the "I was just following orders" defence, there is a provision in the military code that one should not follow an illegal order?

I hope I am right, as I am hanging my hope on it - that the TT cannot order anything unjustified? That the military, with their oath to the Constitution, and not to the president, CAN disobey an order from their C-in-C?

Edited August 9, 2017 by sawasdee

[Coconut Flan]

2 minutes ago, sawasdee said:

But am I remembering correctly, that after Nuremberg and the "I was just following orders" defence, there is a provision in the military code that one should not follow an illegal order?

This is true for the US at least.  

As for extra boxes, just delete them. 

Put your cursor on the box and a small x will appear at the top left corner.  Click on that x and then either backspace or delete.

[GreyhoundFan]

1 hour ago, sawasdee said:

The last sentence of this left me speechless. The rest just truly angered me.

Ed Rogers is an idiotic BT. He frequently writes dumb crap like that opinion piece. I try not to read his stuff, just like I don't watch Hannity, because I can't stand the crap.

[nvmbr02]

Thanks for all the support everyone. I woke up today feeling a lot more positive. We were hanging out with friends last night and it is amazing how a few laughs and a drink or two can lighten the mood. 

And yes @sawasdee the military is trained to not follow illegal orders. It doesn't mean that illegal orders aren't followed sometimes but there is a legal avenue for military members to follow if needed. 

[MarblesMom]

I just got off a FB video chat with my son in Seoul.  He told me (a) the Cheeto is an ass (he is MY boy, after all) and (b) his local military friends tell him their concern is to get civilians out before the SHTF.

Banking on those military friends when he needs them.

[GreyhoundFan]

"I live on Guam. Here’s how we’re coping with the North Korea nuclear standoff."

Spoiler

Living on Guam is a dichotomy — a beautiful island in the middle of the Western Pacific that plays an important strategic role in scary world events, the homeland of the Chamorro people for 3,500 years or more. We who call Guam our home are reminded of this reality every day.

We wake up to colorful sunrises, drive to work next to the deep blue Pacific Ocean, see brilliant rainbows and spectacular cloud formations every day. The reef life, waterfalls, beaches and sunsets are awesome all the time. The living is easy, and we love it intensely. Some 1.3 million people visit Guam each year to enjoy it with us. Mostly Asian, the visitors come to enjoy the beauty of Guam and the warm hospitality of the Chamorro people. Tourists are the bedrock of our economy.

But we also see uniformed soldiers, warships, submarines that we know are heavily armed, and huge military planes and helicopters daily. There are international military exercises here regularly. Nearly everyone on the island has at least one relative serving in the military. It’s just a small island — we know each other, including the U.S. Armed Forces personnel stationed here. We shop and eat and drink together.

This has been Guam’s fate — the island is large enough to host a good number of people and has plenty of fresh water and a substantial deep harbor. And we’re used to being treated as a pawn in other powers’ strategic games: In 1941, the United States gave up Guam without much of a defense against a Japanese attack in World War II. U.S. forces sent their dependents home just before Japan attacked, leaving a small contingent of soldiers ill-equipped to protect the island. Chamorros suffered greatly at the hands of the Japanese for 2½ years. More than 1,000 Chamorros were killed.

Memories of that devastating time were brought back this week, as President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un threatened each other, making the people of Guam feel as though we all have targets on our backs. On Wednesday, North Korea announced that it might fire missiles to within 25 miles of Guam.

We try to shrug it off, make some jokes about how idiotic these leaders are and then get on with our lives. As we watch hour after hour of the news, people say brave things like: We are strong, we are resilient, our faith will sustain us. The U.S. military will protect us this time, because now we are U.S. citizens. It seems all the world’s media is finally looking at us.

Just about everyone on Guam is getting tearful, panicky calls from friends and family off the island begging them to leave and go somewhere safer. Social media is heavy with these conversations, and people are angry that this is happening here again.

We just celebrated our Liberation Day with memories of war fresh on our minds.

One woman told me that her son called this morning worried sick, as his whole family is on Guam except him. If Guam is bombed, he will be all alone in the world. She spoke with him for quite a while and said he’s okay now. She asked him to pray for peace and is confident that the U.S. military will intercept any missiles fired at us.

Another friend told me that she has broken out in a terrible rash from stress. She has a granddaughter in the military stationed at the Korean Demilitarized Zone and fears for her safety. The young woman told her grandmother by phone this week that they have been immunized for poisons and wear protective clothing. They will have only two minutes to act if attacked, she said. But “don’t worry, Grammie, we’re going to be all right. You raised a tough Santa Rita girl.” After she hung up, my friend cried, because she knew her granddaughter was terribly scared and just trying to put on a brave face.

A neighbor looks at it this way: We’ve all been given one life to live, and she is choosing to be the best person she can, to live fearlessly and courageously. Another said she will not let this ruin her life. She will continue her everyday life, she said, and she rests in the hands of God.

A veteran told me that he knows the scenarios of engagement and is aware of the assets and capabilities of the United States and its allies. He also knows that no one wants a nuclear war, because everybody loses. He said it’s time for a regime change in North Korea.

Many people here have been angry about a Fox News graphic showing that Guam has a total of 3,831 Americans affected by the threat — which excludes the local population of 160,000 people, all of whom are U.S. citizens, too, though as an unincorporated territory of the United States, we don’t vote for president and have no voting representation in Congress. It’s a never-ending dilemma for us, leaving us with a sense of disempowerment. We’ve worked for years on decolonization and self-determination but haven’t made much progress.

We are all watching, though, to see whether the military starts sending their dependents off Guam again. We are fervently hoping that cooler heads will prevail.

I was thinking of you, @nvmbr02, when I read this article.