North Korea and South Korea

[onekidanddone]

I'm just going to find my happy place, take a bunch of Xanax and go hide until this is all over.  Whom am I kidding? You all know I'll be right here on FJ freaking out with my FJ peeps.

[GreyhoundFan]

"China warns North Korea: You’re on your own if you go after the United States"

Spoiler

BEIJING — China won’t come to North Korea’s help if it launches missiles threatening U.S. soil and there is retaliation, a state-owned newspaper warned on Friday, but it would intervene if Washington strikes first. 

The Global Times newspaper is not an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, but in this case its editorial probably does reflect government policy and can be considered “semiofficial,” experts said.

China has repeatedly warned both Washington and Pyongyang not to do anything that raises tensions or causes instability on the Korean Peninsula, and strongly reiterated that suggestion Friday.

“The current situation on the Korean Peninsula is complicated and sensitive,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement.

...

“China hopes that all relevant parties will be cautious on their words and actions, and do things that help to alleviate tensions and enhance mutual trust, rather than walk on the old pathway of taking turns in shows of strength, and upgrading the tensions.”

In an editorial, The Global Times said China should make it clear to both sides: “when their actions jeopardize China's interests, China will respond with a firm hand.”

“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,” it added. “If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.” 

The Global Times warning comes at the end of a week of threat and counterthreat between Washington and Pyongyang, and as the United States weighs up its options to deal with the threat of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program. 

The Global Times said both sides were engaging in a “reckless game” that runs the risk of descending into a real war. 

The brinkmanship weighed on world financial markets for a fourth consecutive day. Main indexes were down in Frankfurt and Paris, and London’s FTSE 100 touched its lowest level since May. Asian markets also slumped, including South Korea’s KOSPI dropping 1.8 percent. Wall Street futures were down.

On Tuesday, President Trump threatened to respond to further threats from North Korea by unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Pyongyang in turn threatened to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the Western Pacific with ballistic missiles.

The Global Times also cited reports that the Pentagon has prepared plans for B-1B strategic bombers to make preemptive strikes on North Korea's missile sites, and a strongly worded ultimatum from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis that North Korea should not consider “actions that would lead to the end of its regime and destruction of its people.” 

The paper’s comments also reflect the 1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, which obliges China to intervene if North Korea is subject to unprovoked aggression — but not necessarily if Pyongyang starts a war. 

“The key point is in the first half of the sentence; China opposes North Korea testing missiles in the waters around Guam,” said Cheng Xiaohe, a North Korea expert at Renmin University of China in Beijing. 

With the situation on the Korea Peninsula sliding dangerously toward the point of no return, Chinese media are starting to declare their positions on any potential war, he said. “Secondly, in a half-official way, China is starting to review and clarify the 1961 treaty.” 

China has become deeply frustrated with the regime in Pyongyang, and genuinely wants to see a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. But it has always refused to do anything that might destabilize or topple a regime which has long been both ally and buffer state. 

That’s because Beijing does not want to see a unified Korean state allied to the United States right up against its border: indeed, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers died during the 1950-53 Korean War to prevent that happening. 

So for now, the current uneasy status quo for China still seems better than the alternatives. 

That is doubly true ahead of an important Communist Party Congress in the fall, at which President Xi Jinping wants to project an aura of stability and control as he aims to consolidate his power at the start of a second five-year term. 

Nevertheless, experts said debate is underway behind the scenes in China about its support for the North Korean regime. 

In an article on the Financial Times China website in May, for example, Tong Zhiwei, a law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, argued that China should make terminating the 1961 treaty a near-term diplomatic goal, because North Korea, also known as the DPRK, had used it as cover to develop its nuclear program and avoid punishment. 

That, he wrote, was not in China’s interests.

“In the past 57 years, the treaty has strongly protected the security of the DPRK and peace on the Korean Peninsula, but it has also been used by the North Korean authorities to protect their international wrongful acts from punishment,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, China has reacted strongly to the United States sending a warship close to an island it controls in the South China Sea.

The U.S. Navy destroyer, USS John S. McCain, traveled close to Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands on Thursday, in the third “freedom of navigation” exercise in the area conducted under the Trump administration, Reuters reported.

China’s Defense Ministry said two Chinese warships “jumped into action” and warned the U.S. ship to leave, labeling the move a “provocation” that seriously harms mutual trust.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the operation had violated international and Chinese law and seriously harmed Beijing's sovereignty and security.

“The Chinese side is strongly dissatisfied with this and will lodge solemn representations to the U.S. side,” the ministry said in a statement.

I wonder how KJU would respond if China negated that 1961 treaty. I can't see him taking that lying down.

[GrumpyGran]

Now we're "locked and loaded." Watches bad movies, now thinks he's in a business dispute with Un that will eventually end up in court. This fool has no idea what a nuclear war would look like and is one of the last people on earth who could deal with it. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Gaming out the North Korea crisis: How the conflict might escalate"

Spoiler

A military confrontation with North Korea may now be “inevitable,” says Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) The United States is “done talking” about North Korea, tweets U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. President Trump threatens “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” then says maybe his language “wasn’t tough enough.”

The North Koreans return verbal fire, talking of using “absolute force” to hit the U.S. territory of Guam and even “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war.”

In this moment of heated, belligerent rhetoric, planners in and out of government are diving into decades of plans and projections, playing out war games, engaging in the macabre semi-science of estimating death tolls and predicting how an adversary might behave. Inside Washington’s “what if?” industry, people at think tanks, universities, consultancies and defense businesses have spent four decades playing out scenarios that the Trump administration now faces anew.

The pathways that have been examined fall into four main categories: doing nothing, hitting Kim Jong Un’s regime with tougher sanctions, pushing for talks, and military confrontation. An armed conflict could take place in disparate spots thousands of miles apart, involving any number of nations and a wide variety of weapons, conventional or nuclear.

In hundreds of books, policy papers and roundtable discussions, experts have couched various shades of armageddon in the dry, emotion-stripped language of throw-weights and missile ranges. But the nightmare scenarios are simple enough: In a launch from North Korea, a nuclear-tipped missile could reach San Francisco in half an hour. A nuclear attack on Seoul, South Korea’s capital of 10 million people, could start and finish in three minutes.

Talking tough about war doesn’t necessarily lead to it. Inflammatory language can work both ways, sometimes lighting the fuse of battle, sometimes bringing the parties to an easing of tensions.

At this volatile intersection, alternatives to war are at least as much the focus as preparation for battle. Luring the North Koreans to the negotiating table is perhaps the most popular pathway among many experts, who advocate a “freeze-for-freeze” option, in which the United States might promise to restrict military exercises in the region or eschew new sanctions against Kim’s regime, in exchange for North Korea agreeing to halt expansion and testing of its nuclear capabilities.

Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates, for example, has suggested promising not to seek regime change in North Korea in exchange for Kim committing to a cap on his nuclear program.

However, Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said the Trump administration rejects the idea of freeze-for-freeze, calling it a false moral equivalency.

Accepting North Korea into the world’s nuclear club is a hard step for many politicians, but maybe not quite as hard as it once was. Now, it’s not so much a step as an acceptance of the status quo.

“I don’t think we’re going to get denuclearization,” said Richard Nephew, a scholar at Columbia University who was a sanctions coordinator in President Barack Obama’s State Department. “So we might want to accept them and depend on deterrence theory. There’s a reason North Korea has not invaded South Korea: They fear overwhelming response from the United States.”

But if North Korea won’t negotiate, or if the Trump administration decides against making concessions that might lure the Kim regime to the table, a military confrontation remains “a very plausible path,” Nephew said. “It’s a very tempting idea to solve this problem once and for all.”

The current spate of North Korean agitation is hardly a new phenomenon. Security experts in Washington have been debating how best to respond to a nuclear threat from the Kim regime for four decades and three generations of the family’s rule. North Korea was presumed to have nuclear warheads in the 1990s, and the country exploded its first nuclear device in 2006.

A military confrontation could start with a U.S. effort to force regime change, either by taking out the Kim regime or by fomenting a rebellion among elites in the isolated dictatorship.

“But it’s hard to imagine that scenario ending with anything other than the North Koreans deciding to light up Seoul,” Nephew said. And if South Korea were given a voice in any U.S. decision to use force, it’s unlikely that Seoul would assent to a strategy that could spark a wider conflagration on the Korean Peninsula.

Most of those who have considered the merits of launching a limited attack on the North — say, to destroy nuclear capabilities — have concluded that what Americans might see as limited could well be interpreted by the Kim regime as an invitation to all-out conflict.

North Korea might even respond with force to the ongoing U.S. show of strength in its neighborhood. American ships, planes and troops have been on maneuvers nearby as part of annual exercises, and the United States sent B-1 bombers stationed in Guam over the Korean Peninsula last month.

The North could also launch its own provocation — an attack on Guam, a cyberattack on Japan or a skirmish on the boundary between the two Koreas, the planet’s most heavily armed border.

In 2010, for example, the North sank a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, and a few months later shelled Yeonpyeong Island, a South Korean territory in the Yellow Sea, killing two soldiers. In those cases, “South Korea took hits and did not retaliate,” said Richard Lacquement, a retired Army colonel who served as a military planner in South Korea. But if they did retaliate, he wondered, might that ignite a larger war?

If the latest North Korean threats about hitting Guam reflect any real intent beyond rhetorical saber-rattling, a launch would be detected by Japanese radar, leading U.S. ships in the Pacific to launch missiles to destroy the North Korean warhead, according to one scenario. The immediate crisis might be averted, but North Korea might then respond by attacking South Korean patrol boats near the border between the two Koreas.

Skirmishes have taken place in that area for many years, but the chances that such a conflict could quickly metastasize into a full-scale war are high, military analysts said.

In a conventional war, heavy casualties would likely result as North Korean troops poured into the South, using tunnels the North is reported to have built under the demilitarized zone between the countries. In addition, North Korea is believed to have a stockpile of several thousand tons of chemical weapons, according to the International Crisis Group, which studies global conflicts.

In war games played out at Washington policy institutes, even minor confrontations have led to a nuclear exchange. In one model, a single nuclear device deployed against Seoul would result in 180,000 deaths and 160,000 additional injuries, along with a near-total collapse of civil order, including a mass exodus from the city leading to gridlock and a paralyzed health-care system.

Even without using nuclear weapons, the North could sow panic and perhaps force a shift in U.S. policy. North Korea might attempt to spread fear through an act of terrorism, said Patrick Cronin, an Asia-Pacific security expert at the Center for a New American Security. “A few grenades in downtown Seoul will absolutely close down the city out of fear,” he said.

Even without nuclear force, North Korea might seek to divide the United States from its allies. How, for example, would regional Asian powers react if North Korea shot a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse over Tokyo, temporarily turning off the lights in the Japanese metropolis?

In that instance, some experts concluded, Japan might join with some neighbors to urge Washington to cut a deal with Kim, averting further military conflict by accepting North Korea as a nuclear power.

North Korea has “proven adept over the years at using force in pretty calibrated ways to achieve political objectives,” said Thomas Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which does war-game planning. He said the North takes advantage of the relative unwillingness of the United States and South Korea to risk war.

“We lived in a period from the end of the Cold War until the recent past where we could delude ourselves that we lived in a risk-free world — and that era is over,” Mahnken said.

Many scenarios exploring how a U.S.-North Korea conflict would unfold founder on uncertainties about what Kim really wants. Despite the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, “the regime does not have regional ambitions,” concluded Robert Carlin of Stanford University and Robert Jervis of Columbia in a paper that studied how North Korea might use its new status.

“The most likely scenario,” they wrote, “is for Pyongyang to remain tightly focused on its domestic situation, especially on its economy, and on ways to loosen or blunt the pressures from its neighbors and the United States.”

Still, they said, “we could well enter the danger zone of North Korean fatalism, in which a decision to use nuclear weapons, especially against Japan — the historic enemy — would rise on the list of ‘patriotic’ options.”

The North Korean leadership, they warned, “might become. . . fatalistic and decide that death with ‘glory’ is preferable to defeat.”

Some sobering thoughts in this article.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Gaming out the North Korea crisis: How the conflict might escalate"

  Hide contents

A military confrontation with North Korea may now be “inevitable,” says Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) The United States is “done talking” about North Korea, tweets U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. President Trump threatens “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” then says maybe his language “wasn’t tough enough.”

The North Koreans return verbal fire, talking of using “absolute force” to hit the U.S. territory of Guam and even “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war.”

In this moment of heated, belligerent rhetoric, planners in and out of government are diving into decades of plans and projections, playing out war games, engaging in the macabre semi-science of estimating death tolls and predicting how an adversary might behave. Inside Washington’s “what if?” industry, people at think tanks, universities, consultancies and defense businesses have spent four decades playing out scenarios that the Trump administration now faces anew.

The pathways that have been examined fall into four main categories: doing nothing, hitting Kim Jong Un’s regime with tougher sanctions, pushing for talks, and military confrontation. An armed conflict could take place in disparate spots thousands of miles apart, involving any number of nations and a wide variety of weapons, conventional or nuclear.

In hundreds of books, policy papers and roundtable discussions, experts have couched various shades of armageddon in the dry, emotion-stripped language of throw-weights and missile ranges. But the nightmare scenarios are simple enough: In a launch from North Korea, a nuclear-tipped missile could reach San Francisco in half an hour. A nuclear attack on Seoul, South Korea’s capital of 10 million people, could start and finish in three minutes.

Talking tough about war doesn’t necessarily lead to it. Inflammatory language can work both ways, sometimes lighting the fuse of battle, sometimes bringing the parties to an easing of tensions.

At this volatile intersection, alternatives to war are at least as much the focus as preparation for battle. Luring the North Koreans to the negotiating table is perhaps the most popular pathway among many experts, who advocate a “freeze-for-freeze” option, in which the United States might promise to restrict military exercises in the region or eschew new sanctions against Kim’s regime, in exchange for North Korea agreeing to halt expansion and testing of its nuclear capabilities.

Former defense secretary Robert M. Gates, for example, has suggested promising not to seek regime change in North Korea in exchange for Kim committing to a cap on his nuclear program.

However, Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said the Trump administration rejects the idea of freeze-for-freeze, calling it a false moral equivalency.

Accepting North Korea into the world’s nuclear club is a hard step for many politicians, but maybe not quite as hard as it once was. Now, it’s not so much a step as an acceptance of the status quo.

“I don’t think we’re going to get denuclearization,” said Richard Nephew, a scholar at Columbia University who was a sanctions coordinator in President Barack Obama’s State Department. “So we might want to accept them and depend on deterrence theory. There’s a reason North Korea has not invaded South Korea: They fear overwhelming response from the United States.”

But if North Korea won’t negotiate, or if the Trump administration decides against making concessions that might lure the Kim regime to the table, a military confrontation remains “a very plausible path,” Nephew said. “It’s a very tempting idea to solve this problem once and for all.”

The current spate of North Korean agitation is hardly a new phenomenon. Security experts in Washington have been debating how best to respond to a nuclear threat from the Kim regime for four decades and three generations of the family’s rule. North Korea was presumed to have nuclear warheads in the 1990s, and the country exploded its first nuclear device in 2006.

A military confrontation could start with a U.S. effort to force regime change, either by taking out the Kim regime or by fomenting a rebellion among elites in the isolated dictatorship.

“But it’s hard to imagine that scenario ending with anything other than the North Koreans deciding to light up Seoul,” Nephew said. And if South Korea were given a voice in any U.S. decision to use force, it’s unlikely that Seoul would assent to a strategy that could spark a wider conflagration on the Korean Peninsula.

Most of those who have considered the merits of launching a limited attack on the North — say, to destroy nuclear capabilities — have concluded that what Americans might see as limited could well be interpreted by the Kim regime as an invitation to all-out conflict.

North Korea might even respond with force to the ongoing U.S. show of strength in its neighborhood. American ships, planes and troops have been on maneuvers nearby as part of annual exercises, and the United States sent B-1 bombers stationed in Guam over the Korean Peninsula last month.

The North could also launch its own provocation — an attack on Guam, a cyberattack on Japan or a skirmish on the boundary between the two Koreas, the planet’s most heavily armed border.

In 2010, for example, the North sank a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, and a few months later shelled Yeonpyeong Island, a South Korean territory in the Yellow Sea, killing two soldiers. In those cases, “South Korea took hits and did not retaliate,” said Richard Lacquement, a retired Army colonel who served as a military planner in South Korea. But if they did retaliate, he wondered, might that ignite a larger war?

If the latest North Korean threats about hitting Guam reflect any real intent beyond rhetorical saber-rattling, a launch would be detected by Japanese radar, leading U.S. ships in the Pacific to launch missiles to destroy the North Korean warhead, according to one scenario. The immediate crisis might be averted, but North Korea might then respond by attacking South Korean patrol boats near the border between the two Koreas.

Skirmishes have taken place in that area for many years, but the chances that such a conflict could quickly metastasize into a full-scale war are high, military analysts said.

In a conventional war, heavy casualties would likely result as North Korean troops poured into the South, using tunnels the North is reported to have built under the demilitarized zone between the countries. In addition, North Korea is believed to have a stockpile of several thousand tons of chemical weapons, according to the International Crisis Group, which studies global conflicts.

In war games played out at Washington policy institutes, even minor confrontations have led to a nuclear exchange. In one model, a single nuclear device deployed against Seoul would result in 180,000 deaths and 160,000 additional injuries, along with a near-total collapse of civil order, including a mass exodus from the city leading to gridlock and a paralyzed health-care system.

Even without using nuclear weapons, the North could sow panic and perhaps force a shift in U.S. policy. North Korea might attempt to spread fear through an act of terrorism, said Patrick Cronin, an Asia-Pacific security expert at the Center for a New American Security. “A few grenades in downtown Seoul will absolutely close down the city out of fear,” he said.

Even without nuclear force, North Korea might seek to divide the United States from its allies. How, for example, would regional Asian powers react if North Korea shot a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse over Tokyo, temporarily turning off the lights in the Japanese metropolis?

In that instance, some experts concluded, Japan might join with some neighbors to urge Washington to cut a deal with Kim, averting further military conflict by accepting North Korea as a nuclear power.

North Korea has “proven adept over the years at using force in pretty calibrated ways to achieve political objectives,” said Thomas Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, which does war-game planning. He said the North takes advantage of the relative unwillingness of the United States and South Korea to risk war.

“We lived in a period from the end of the Cold War until the recent past where we could delude ourselves that we lived in a risk-free world — and that era is over,” Mahnken said.

Many scenarios exploring how a U.S.-North Korea conflict would unfold founder on uncertainties about what Kim really wants. Despite the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, “the regime does not have regional ambitions,” concluded Robert Carlin of Stanford University and Robert Jervis of Columbia in a paper that studied how North Korea might use its new status.

“The most likely scenario,” they wrote, “is for Pyongyang to remain tightly focused on its domestic situation, especially on its economy, and on ways to loosen or blunt the pressures from its neighbors and the United States.”

Still, they said, “we could well enter the danger zone of North Korean fatalism, in which a decision to use nuclear weapons, especially against Japan — the historic enemy — would rise on the list of ‘patriotic’ options.”

The North Korean leadership, they warned, “might become. . . fatalistic and decide that death with ‘glory’ is preferable to defeat.”

Some sobering thoughts in this article.

Yes, @GreyhoundFan, a lot there. I want very much for this to de-escalate NOW! And I'm horrified that people who could work toward that are just standing by while these two five-year-olds engage in an apocalyptic playground fight. If this goes any further our darling president will be essentially destroying another country, South Korea.

And make no mistake, the economic effects on Guam are going to become very clear, soon if not immediately. You may not think of vacationing there but lots of Japanese do. And let's not forget that their country is also in danger if baby Un goes ballistic.

I want it to go away but if the bluster is effective it will also embolden the bully into thinking he can bully any country he has an imagined beef with. He's on a military-might high. Having tanks and war planes and ships at his disposal gives him a massive hard-on. 

[fraurosena]

The most frustrating and frankly infuriating thing about this is the fact that the presidunce is willing (and alas, also able) to start a nuclear war in order to distract from what Mueller is digging up in his investigation.

How coincidental, that his fire and fury threat was made on the very day the news about that FBI raid on Manafort's house was in the media.

It's appalling, disgusting, and very, very frightening indeed that he's literally putting millions of lives on the line to save his own traitorous ass.

[candygirl200413]

*Me telling my future children about fuckface sham of a Presidency*

"yes young child, that man wanted to distract everyone about Russia influencing our election that he did start a nuclear war with North Korea"

[fraurosena]

When even journalists admit prodding the bear is a bad idea.

 

[GrumpyGran]

31 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

When even journalists admit prodding the bear is a bad idea.

 

OMG, the responses to that tweet! Some great ideas. And seriously, we might be there. There's no doubt now that he's a moron and his base are mindless, so they love every dangerous thing he says. Ask the half-way sane people the important questions, people like McMasters, Tillerson, ok, that's all I've got, but throw soft balls at him. What's Trump Tower like? What great things has FLOTUS got planned? When will Jared go back to the Middle East? Has he met any of our Olympic athletes? How's Ivanka's clothing line doing? What did he shoot on the course today? Who did he beat?

Don't ask about Mueller, NK, China, debt, taxes, health care.

His flying monkeys will still try to stir him up, but I think that we can telegraph the message to the world that he is inconsequential to most of us while we clean that swamp out!

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo's editorial board: "There are only two ways forward on North Korea"

Spoiler

SOME OBSERVERS are arguing that we are finally seeing how President Trump behaves in a real global crisis, as opposed to a mess created by his own White House. That’s not entirely true. It is Mr. Trump who has decided to bring the tension with North Korea to a boil at this moment, and then keep turning up the flame.

That’s not to deny the real and vexing challenge posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons capability. Kim Jong Un, third-generation scion of one of the world’s cruelest regimes, is not well known or understood. His rhetoric toward South Korea, Japan and the United States is implacably hostile. His military’s steady advances in missile and warhead technology, year after year, are alarming.

The Obama administration’s response to these advances was to do — well, not much of anything, under the euphemism of “strategic patience.” No one can claim this non-policy was a success. But Mr. Trump’s policy of ever-escalating threats and boasts, descending to Mr. Kim’s level, raises the risk of dangerous miscalculation, which is then exacerbated by mixed messages from his administration.

What might work better? The United States enjoys vast military superiority over North Korea, and the Clinton administration seriously considered a preemptive strike two decades ago. But North Korea’s arsenal today is more extensive, dispersed and hidden. And the chief drawback to military action then remains true: Even without nuclear weapons, North Korea could quickly unleash retaliatory strikes that could kill millions of people in Seoul and beyond. War with North Korea would be a horror.

The most merciful option for North Korea’s 25 million people would be the end of the hereditary Kim regime, which keeps its population in what is essentially one large prison camp. A U.N. report three years ago found “an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” In North Korea’s gulag, the report found, “the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide.” Hundreds of thousands have died as a result. The diversion of massive resources to nuclear and other military programs, given most North Koreans’ poverty, is just one indication of misrule.

Unfortunately, outside nations don’t know how to loosen the grip of a tyrant such as Mr. Kim. For years, U.S. officials have hoped that China, upon which North Korea’s economy depends, would help do so. But the Chinese communist regime, while at times annoyed by North Korea, fears the chaos of regime collapse, or the strengthening of a unified Korea, more than a nuclear North Korea, and so U.S. officials invariably end up disappointed.

That leaves two options. One is to live with a nuclear North Korea, as we have long lived with a nuclear China, hoping to deter its use of nuclear weapons by assuring Mr. Kim that his regime’s destruction would immediately ensue. The other is to assemble a coalition of nations to impose economic sanctions sufficiently punitive and targeted at the regime that Mr. Kim decides he would be better off making a deal.

Our view remains that it is worth trying the latter before accepting the former. At times, as when it engineered a ratcheting up of U.N. Security Council sanctions not long ago, the Trump administration has seemed to share that view. An optimist might posit that Mr. Trump’s bombast could persuade China, Russia and others to join in a sanctions regime because the alternative is so frightening. But to be successful, such a strategy also would require patience, diplomacy, coherence and quiet strength. Just to list those qualities is to acknowledge how unlikely success seems at this moment.

 

[Howl]

OK, we now live in a world where China (CHINA!) has called for Trump and Kim Jong Un to cool the rhetoric.  

 

[Gobsmacked]

I have just one question. Please come back President Obama? 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a WaPo article from last year. I got to thinking about it with all the crap going on and thought I'd share. Before reading the article, I didn't realize KJU had close relatives living in the US. "The secret life of Kim Jong Un’s aunt, who has lived in the U.S. since 1998"

Spoiler

NEW YORK — Wandering through Times Square, past the Naked Cowboy and the Elmos and the ticket touts, she could be any immigrant trying to live the American Dream.

A 60-year-old Korean woman with a soft perm and conservative clothes, she’s taking a weekend off from pressing shirts and hemming pants at the dry-cleaning business she runs with her husband.

But she’s not just any immigrant. She’s an aunt to Kim Jong Un, the young North Korean leader who has threatened to wipe out New York with a hydrogen bomb.

And for the past 18 years, since defecting from North Korea into the waiting arms of the CIA, she has been living an anonymous life here in the United States with her husband and three children.

“My friends here tell me I’m so lucky, that I have everything,” Ko Yong Suk, as she was known when she was part of North Korea’s royal family, told The Washington Post on a recent weekend. “My kids went to great schools and they’re successful, and I have my husband, who can fix anything. There’s nothing we can envy.”

Her husband, previously known as Ri Gang, chimes in with laughter: “I think we have achieved the American Dream.”

This is the story of how one family went from the top of North Korea to middle America.

Breaking their silence in the United States, Ko and Ri spent almost 20 hours talking to two Washington Post reporters in New York City and then at their home several hours’ drive away. They were nervous about emerging from their anonymity; after all, there are Americans who analyze North Korea for a living and do not even know that the couple are here.

They asked The Post not to publish the names they use in the United States or to reveal where they live, mainly to protect their grown children, who live normal professional lives.

Ko bears a striking resemblance to her sister, Ko Yong Hui, who was one of Kim Jong Il’s wives and the mother of Kim Jong Un, the third-generation leader of North Korea. And she had a particularly close relationship with the man now considered one of the United States’ top enemies: She took care of Kim Jong Un while he was at school in Switzerland.

But in 1998, when Kim Jong Un was 14 and older brother Kim Jong Chol was 17, Ko and Ri decided to defect. Ko’s sister, their link to the regime, was sick with terminal breast cancer — although she did not die until 2004 — and the boys were getting older. The couple apparently realized that they would not be needed by the regime much longer and fled, concerned about losing their privileged status.

The Kim family has ruled North Korea for 70 years, through a repressive system built on patronage and fear. The royal family and top cadres in the Workers’ Party benefit from this system — and have the most to lose if it collapses or if they run afoul of the regime.

So the couple decided to flee — not to South Korea, as many North Koreans do, but to the United States.

They have worked long hours running their dry-cleaning store, and their three children have come of age here, going to good colleges and getting good jobs.

The family home is a large, two-story house with two cars in the driveway, a huge TV in the living room, a grill on a rear deck. They’ve been to Las Vegas on vacation, and two years ago went to South Korea, where Ko enjoyed visiting the palaces she had seen in TV dramas.

They look like a normal family.

But look closer. That photo of her eldest son on a jet-ski? It’s at Wonsan, where the Kim family has its summer residence. That girl in the photo album? It’s Kim Yo Jong, Kim Jong Un’s younger sister, who runs the propaganda division of the Workers’ Party.

And the house? It was bought partly with a one-time payment of $200,000 that the CIA gave the couple on their arrival, they said.

Even though Ko and Ri have not seen Kim Jong Un in almost 20 years and do not appear to have held official positions, U.S. intelligence on North Korea is so thin that this couple still represents a valuable source of information on the family court.

They can reveal, for example, that Kim Jong Un was born in 1984 — not 1982 or 1983, as has been widely thought. The reason they’re certain? It was the same year that their first son was born. “He and my son were playmates from birth. I changed both of their diapers,” Ko said with a laugh.

Sometimes, operatives from the CIA’s national clandestine service come to town to show Ko and Ri photos of North Koreans and ask who the people are.

The CIA declined to confirm or comment on any of Ko and Ri’s claims. Some parts of the couple’s history can be verified, but other parts cannot or seem incomplete.

Even today, Ri in particular is sympathetic toward the North Korean regime and is trying to get approval to visit Pyongyang. And both are careful in what they say about their nephew, to whom they refer as “Marshal Kim Jong Un.”

But what they will say about their former charge paints a picture of a man who was raised knowing that he would one day be king.

In 1992, Ko Yong Suk arrived in Bern, Switzerland, with Kim Jong Chol, the first son of Ko’s sister and Kim Jong Il, who in two years would become the leader of North Korea. Kim Jong Un arrived in 1996, when he was 12.

“We lived in a normal house and acted like a normal family. I acted like their mother,” Ko said about her time in Bern. “I encouraged him to bring his friends home, because we wanted them to live a normal life. I made snacks for the kids. They ate cake and played with Legos.”

Traveling on a diplomatic passport, Ri went back and forth between North Korea and Switzerland, sometimes ferrying their youngest daughter and Kim Jong Un’s younger sister back and forth.

The family spoke Korean at home and ate Korean food but also enjoyed the benefits of an expatriate family in an exotic locale. Ko took the Kim children to Euro Disney, now Disneyland Paris. Kim Jong Un had been to Tokyo Disneyland with his mother some years before — and her photo albums are full of pictures of them skiing in the Swiss Alps, swimming on the French Riviera, eating at al fresco restaurants in Italy.

Kim Jong Un loved games and machinery, trying to figure out how ships float and planes fly. He was already showing personality traits that would later become much more evident.

“He wasn’t a troublemaker, but he was short-tempered and had a lack of tolerance,” Ko recalled. “When his mother tried to tell him off for playing with these things too much and not studying enough, he wouldn’t talk back, but he would protest in other ways, like going on a hunger strike.”

Kim loved going home for the summer, spending time in Wonsan, where the family has a huge beachfront compound, or at their main residence in Pyongyang, with its movie theater and plenty of room to hang out.

“He started playing basketball, and he became obsessed with it,” his aunt said of the young Kim, who was a Michael Jordan fan and later hosted basketball player Dennis Rodman as a guest several times in North Korea. “He used to sleep . . . with his basketball.”

He was shorter than his friends, and his mother told him that if he played basketball, he would become taller, Ko said.

Later, at their house, Ri produced a never-publicly seen photo, laminated and stored in an envelope, of a slightly built Kim, aged 13, and his older brother among a team wearing basketball uniforms after a tournament in Pyongyang. Ri is sitting in the front row, while Ko is standing in the back. Kim is holding a gold trophy.

The world did not know that Kim had been anointed his father’s successor until October 2010, when his status was made official at a Workers’ Party conference in Pyongyang. But Kim had known since 1992 that he would one day inherit North Korea.

The signal was sent at his eighth birthday party, attended by North Korea’s top brass, the couple said. Kim was given a general’s uniform decorated with stars, and real generals with real stars bowed to him and paid their respects to him from that moment on.

“It was impossible for him to grow up as a normal person when the people around him were treating him like that,” Ko said.

From a humble background, Ko was catapulted into the top echelons of North Korean society when her sister, a performer, caught the eye of the princeling Kim Jong Il, and she became his third partner in 1975.

“I was very close to my sister, and it was a tough job to be the wife, so she asked me to help her. She could trust me because I was her own blood,” Ko said.

Kim Jong Il personally selected Ri to marry his sister-in-law. They all lived in a compound in Pyongyang, with Ko looking after her sister’s and her own children for several years.

“We lived the good life,” Ko said. Over a sushi lunch in New York, she reminisced about drinking cognac with sparkling water and eating caviar in Pyongyang, about riding with Kim Jong Il in his Mercedes-Benz.

Then came the charmed years in Europe. But in 1998, Ko’s sister discovered she had breast cancer and underwent treatment in Switzerland and France.

This is where Ko and Ri’s version of events starts to become opaque. Given that Ri is trying to get back into Kim Jong Un’s good graces, he has reason to present their defection as nothing but altruistic.

The way Ri and Ko tell it, the cancer treatment in Europe was not working, so they decided they should travel to the United States to try to secure treatment for Ko’s dying sister. Their defection was all about trying to save Kim Jong Un’s mother, they say.

Stories about the couple in the South Korean news media have suggested that they sought asylum in the United States because they were concerned about what could happen to them after either of Kim Jong Un’s parents died. This was their link to the royal family, and without that link, what would happen to them?

Walking through Central Park on a Sunday morning, Ko seemed to imply that this was a concern.

“In history, you often see people close to a powerful leader getting into unintended trouble because of other people,” she said. “I thought it would be better if we stayed out of that kind of trouble.”

They had reason to be scared, given Ko’s sister’s position, said Michael Madden, editor of the North Korea Leadership Watch website.

“Ko Yong Hui was an ambitious woman — she wanted her sons to be promoted, and she made enemies in the process,” Madden said. “If you were her sister or her brother-in-law, you would feel threatened. Someone could easily make you disappear.”

Just look at the case of Jang Song Thaek, the uncle who also lived in the Pyongyang compound with Ko and Ri. He apparently built up too much power. In 2013, Kim had him executed.

So one day in 1998, Ri and Ko and their three children took a taxi to the U.S. Embassy in Bern. They said they were North Korean diplomats and wanted asylum. After several days, during which time a Korean speaker flew in from Washington, they were taken to a U.S. military base near Frankfurt.

They stayed in a house on the base for several months while they were questioned. Then Ri and Ko disclosed their family connections.

“The American government didn’t know who Kim Jong Un was, that he would become the leader,” Ri said.

The U.S. government did not tell its ally South Korea that it had Ko and Ri until they were on American soil, apparently infuriating the government in Seoul.

For U.S. intelligence agencies, which struggle to get reliable information about the inner workings of the North Korean regime, the defection must have seemed like hitting the intelligence jackpot.

But Ri insists they did not know much. “They thought we must know some secrets, but we didn’t know anything,” he said. “We were just looking after the children and helping them study, so of course we saw a lot of their private lives, but we had nothing to do with defense. We didn’t know any nuclear or military secrets.”

Madden said the pair would have had limited intelligence value. Alexandre Mansourov, a North Korean leadership expert who once studied at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, agreed.

“Yes, they understand the system very well,” he said. However, “they missed the famine and the recovery, the transition to the new leadership, and all the events of the last five years. In that sense, they’re living in the past.”

When they landed in the United States, the family spent a few days in the Washington area — not far from the CIA — before moving to a small city where a South Korean church had offered to help them, as it did for others who escaped the North.

“The people at the church kept asking us questions. They knew we were from North Korea, but they told us we didn’t look like North Koreans. They kept asking us questions,” Ko said.

So the family moved to a different city with very few other Koreans, or even other Asians.

“Life was hard at the beginning. We had no relatives, and we were working for 12 hours every day,” Ri said. He worked as a builder, then did maintenance in an apartment house, jobs that were easy to do without English.

Ko was frustrated at not being able to work and contribute. “The only thing I could do without speaking the language was dry cleaning,” she said in Korean. Ri speaks reasonable English today, but Ko’s is still basic.

So they opened a small store and began working long hours, Ri at the machines and Ko doing alterations. They soon hit their stride. “Seeing my kids doing well in school and my husband working so hard gave me the strength and energy to carry on,” Ko said.

Their children have no interest in Korea, North or South, she said.

They have a comfortable existence but certainly do not appear to be living large. Stopping at a gas station for lunch on the way back to their home, Ko remarked that bottled water was very cheap and was disappointed that the Dunkin’ Donuts was out of burritos.

So why are they breaking their silence now?

Ri says he wants to visit North Korea and has come out of their deep cover to dispel what he calls “lies” being peddled about them and their family in North Korea by regime critics in South Korea.

Last year, Ri and Ko moved to sue three high-level North Korean defectors who had been on South Korean television accusing them of a variety of activities including having plastic surgery and stealing millions of dollars from the Kim regime. The couple hired a celebrity lawyer, Kang Yong-seok, to pursue a defamation case, but it was thrown out on a technicality. Kang arranged for The Washington Post to meet the couple and was present for most of the interviews in New York.

Even after the years the couple has spent in the United States, North Korea still has some pull.

Ri, who is particularly careful around reporters not to speak ill of the regime, is positioning himself as the person to bridge the widening gap between Washington and Pyongyang.

“My ultimate goal is to go back to North Korea. I understand America and I understand North Korea, so I think I can be a negotiator between the two,” he said. “If Kim Jong Un is how I remembered he used to be, I would be able to meet him and talk to him.”

Mansourov described Ri’s hopes to return to North Korea as “ridiculous.”

“He has a nice life in the U.S. Why would he want to go back? Unless he’s ready to ‘go upstairs,’ ” he said.

Ko said she misses her home town — the pull of the home town cannot be underestimated in Korean culture — but does not want to go back. Nor does she want Ri to visit. “But how can I change my stubborn husband’s mind?”

Luckily for Ko, that decision is Kim Jong Un’s. And he’s not showing any interest in having an intermediary anytime soon to help him improve relations with the United States.

There are some interesting pictures accompanying the article.

[CTRLZero]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Before reading the article, I didn't realize KJU had close relatives living in the US.

This was interesting, thanks for posting this.  I was surprised to learn that KJU was educated in Europe, and also that after defecting 20 years ago, his aunt and uncle want to return to North Korea:

Quote

“My ultimate goal is to go back to North Korea. I understand America and I understand North Korea, so I think I can be a negotiator between the two,” he said. “If Kim Jong Un is how I remembered he used to be, I would be able to meet him and talk to him.”

I bet the young lad has changed a wee bit, and his uncle had better watch his back should he ever be allowed into North Korea.

[GreyhoundFan]

"China bans North Korean iron, lead, coal imports as part of U.N. sanctions"

Spoiler

BEIJING — China moved to tighten economic pressure on North Korea by implementing a new package of U.N. sanctions Monday, but it simultaneously had a warning for the Trump administration: Don’t spoil our new-found unity by starting a trade war.

The Commerce Ministry announced a ban on imports of iron ore, iron, lead and coal from North Korea effective Tuesday — although China will continue to clear goods that have already arrived in port until Sept. 5.

At the same time, Beijing warned President Trump not to split the international coalition over North Korea by provoking a trade war between China and the United States.

Trump signed an executive memorandum Monday afternoon instructing his top trade negotiator to launch an investigation into Chinese intellectual property violations, a move that could eventually result in severe trade penalties.

 In China, these proposed measures were seen both as an attempt to pressure Beijing to act more strongly against North Korea and as an effort to shift the blame for the world’s failure to rein in Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs onto China alone.

“It is obviously improper to use one thing as a tool to impose pressure on another thing,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Monday at a routine news conference. 

With the commercial relationship between the two countries becoming more intertwined by the day, she said, a trade war is not a good idea. “There will be no winner,” she said. “It will be lose-lose.”

In an editorial, the state-owned China Daily newspaper said Trump was asking too much of China regarding North Korea, also known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK.

Trump’s “transactional approach to foreign affairs” is unhelpful, it said, while “politicizing trade will only exacerbate [the United States’] economic woes, and poison the overall China-U.S. relationship.”

That won’t bring results when it comes to North Korea, either, the editorial argued.

“By trying to incriminate Beijing as an accomplice in the DPRK’s nuclear adventure and blame it for a failure that is essentially a failure of all stakeholders, Trump risks making the serious mistake of splitting up the international coalition that is the means to resolve the issue peacefully,” it said. 

“Hopefully Trump will find another path. Things will become even more difficult if Beijing and Washington are pitted against each other.”

China accounts for roughly 90 percent of North Korean trade but moved in February to suspend North Korea’s coal imports until the end of the year. Coal normally accounts for about half of North Korea’s exports, but despite the coal ban, overall trade between the two countries has remained healthy.

Last month, China announced that imports from North Korea fell to $880 million in the six months that ended in June, down 13 percent from a year earlier. Notably, China’s coal imports from North Korea dropped precipitously, with only 2.7 million tons being shipped in the first half of 2017, down 75 percent from 2016.

But iron ore imports grew sharply, reaching 1.34 million tons, worth an estimated $68 million, a 60 percent jump in the first half of the year.

A 29 percent spike in Chinese exports to North Korea — North Korea bought $1.67 billion worth of Chinese products in the first six months of the year — also helped push total trade between the two countries up 10 percent between January and June, compared with the same period last year.

The latest move to stem imports of iron, iron ore, lead and lead ore, as well as seafood products, will put significantly more pressure on Pyongyang. But it is unlikely to be enough to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, which it sees as essential to its own survival, experts say.

China is very reluctant to do anything that might destabilize the regime, which is a long-standing ally. It blames American hostility toward Pyongyang for forcing the regime to develop its nuclear program, and is urging dialogue to reduce tensions.

The move against China over trade was also seen here as an attempt to distract attention from Trump’s domestic problems.

“Bashing China cannot solve U.S. economic problems, experts say,” the state-run Xinhua news agency proclaimed.

The nationalist Global Times newspaper said a trade war with China could “boomerang” on Trump, because U.S. society and opinion could not withstand the losses that would result. 

“If a China-US trade war starts, many of those who now support a hardline stance toward China would turn against the Trump administration,” it wrote in an editorial.

It even tried to link developments to violence and “racial hatred” that broke out in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend.

“The source of global instability may not be North Korea’s nuclear ambitions nor Europe’s refu­gee crisis, but the chaos in the US,” it wrote in a separate opinion piece. “The public is also concerned that Trump is using international disputes to divert public attention away from the domestic turmoil.”

Interesting. Hopefully China will help pressure KJU.

[candygirl200413]

North Korea’s Trump card — chemical weapons targeting American troops

Quote

SEOUL, South Korea

As evidence piles up about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, some of President Trump’s supporters and outside advisers are urging him to launch a preemptive strike on Kim Jong Un’s weapons facilities or the missiles being prepared for launch.

But there’s at least one significant reason why U.S. military leaders would be reluctant to carry out such a strike: North Korea would surely retaliate, and this retaliation could include use of chemical weapons.

The casualties would be unimaginable. Some 23 million people live in the region of Seoul, with parts of the city sitting a mere 35 miles from the North Korean border. Also at risk would be some 150,000 U.S. citizens who live in South Korea, including 29,000 troops stationed there.

“Nuclear weapons are not the only threat,” said Kelsey Davenport, director of non-proliferation policy for the Arms Control Association. “North Korea could respond to a U.S. attack using chemical weapons. That would be devastating.”

North Korea is known to have compiled large stockpiles of nerve agents such as sarin and VX. It could fire these from hidden artillery and missile sites, targeting U.S. military bases in the region and cities such as Seoul and Tokyo.

North Korea started developing chemical weapons in 1961, when the father of the country, Kim Il Sung, issued his “Declaration of Chemicalization” amid rising tensions at that time. North Korea officially denies that it possesses chemical weapons, but according to the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, the country has four military bases equipped with chemical weapons and 11 facilities where such weapons are produced and stored.

A separate analysis in 2011 concluded that North Korea had 2,500 to 5,000 tons of these weapons.

While a surprise U.S. strike might be able to eliminate some of these stockpiles, North Korea’s artillery guns are thought to be preloaded with chemical weapons, allowing them to be deployed instantly. Hundreds of these guns are within range of Seoul, or at least parts of the city, many of them buried in mountainsides. “It would be difficult, if not impossible, to neutralize this artillery in any preventative strike,” Davenport said.

A recent report by Reid Kirby, a military analyst, details the challenges the U.S.-South Korean alliance faces with North Korea’s stockpiles of chemical weapons.

“Compared to the nuclear threat, which involves a finite number of warheads and delivery systems vulnerable to air defenses and antimissile systems, the chemical threat is not as easily negated,” wrote Kirby in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Some analysts say that North Korea has purposely exaggerated its chemical weapons capability, part of a strategy to deter a foreign attack. Chemical weapons decay over time and Joo Seong Ha, a defector from North Korea and a journalist based in Seoul, said the north does not have an effective system for maintaining and replenishing its supplies of agents such as sarin and VX.

Other analysts disagree. Daniel Pinkston, a North Korea military specialist at Troy University in Seoul, said that Pyongyang’s military leaders have demonstrated they can develop and maintain sophisticated weaponry.

“The most important thing is for them is to have the human capacity to produce this material, store it and deploy it,” said Pinkston. “It is clear they have this capacity.”

VX and sarin are both potent nerve agents, which act on the nervous system of an organism, preventing muscles from functioning. Both are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, but several countries maintain stockpiles.

Syria has allegedly used sarin in its battle against anti-government rebels, and a terrorist group in Japan used homemade VX in a 1995 Tokyo subway attack that killed 13 people and injured thousands.

Pinkston notes that North Korea most recently used VX in the February assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the outcast half-brother of Kim Jong Un, at Kuala Lumpur’s airport. According to Kirby, that attack “was undoubtedly a reminder to North Korea’s enemies of the chemical threat that Pyongyang poses.”

For decades, the city of Seoul has maintained a civil defense plan to prepare residents for an attack from the north. More than 3,300 civil defense evacuation centers are spread across the city, along with 17,500 protective shelters. Both the United States and South Korea have developed smart phone apps for their citizens to aid in an evacuation.

Even so, a bombardment of Seoul with conventional artillery would possibly kill tens of thousands of civilians, with numbers higher if chemical weapons were used. “Civilians would suffer much greater casualties than the military, which have protective gear,” said Pinkston.

Every year, the United States and South Korea hold a joint military exercise to prepare for a possible conflict with North Korea. This exercise, which starts Aug. 21 this year, generally include troops donning protective gear to simulate conditions during a chemical attack.

David S. Maxwell, a retired U.S. Army special forces colonel, recalls donning that protective gear during summer months while he was stationed in South Korea.

“It is brutal. It degrades your capability,” said Maxwell, a Korea specialist at Georgetown University. “The simplest thing — staying hydrated and drinking water through a protective mask — is very difficult.”

Maxwell says he has little doubt about North Korea’s willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.

“It would use chemical weapons on the first day,” he said. One likely target would be U.S. and South Korean air bases, to disrupt allied air power. “Korean and U.S. forces train for this,” he said. “They train to decontaminate runways and aircraft, so they can continue to launch aircraft and rearm them.”

For the same reason, North Korea might also use chemical weapons on ports and navy bases in South Korea, to prevent re-supply of forces during a conflict.

“The north would want to degrade the logistics chain of delivery in the south,” Pinkston said. “Chemical weapons could be one tool to do that. It would also have some shock value that might prevent other countries from entering the conflict on the south’s behalf.”

Any North Korean use of chemical weapons, of course, would bring international condemnation and likely escalate the U.S. response. Still, if North Korea were attacked first and its nuclear deterrent were compromised, analysts have little doubt Pyongyang might turn to the chemical option.

Said Davenport, “There are legitimate concerns that sustained use of chemical weapons in Syria has lowered the threshold for their use elsewhere.”

 

 

 

[MarblesMom]

Well, I have a 30 y/o son working right there in Seoul.

A real live, college degreed American civilian, who had to move to a foreign country to get a job that would pay him more than $12 an hour.

No blame at you @candygirl200413 whatsoever.  I appreciate the post.

These are strange times, scary times.

[nvmbr02]

@MarblesMom

I am thinking of your son. We have a few friends in Seoul too. Some Korean, some American civilians working in Korea and some military stationed there. 

 

As for us, we are hanging in here on this little island, trying to keep up with the latest news. The Lt. Gov. just had a press conference and basically stated that the threat level is still the same. Kim Jong Un has supposedly reviewed plans but hasn't given an order to strike. Some of the local news agencies are reporting that the crisis nearing an end while others are still whipping everyone into a frenzy. Tourism is still going strong. I was just at Kmart which is pretty much a major tourist attraction here and is it still busting full of Japanese and South Korean tourists. 

I am finding myself very stressed by the whole thing. One minute I'm feeling good thinking there is no way they will strike us, our military will tear them to shreds if they do. Then the next I'm feeling panicky. It doesn't help with the local homeland security sends out information sheets on what to do if we are hit with a nuclear missile. 

Other stuff is just frustrating. We know there is an evacuation plan with my husband's work. However. we have not been briefed on any of the details if it comes to that. Hopefully it doesn't but I like to be prepared. To make matters worse, Dh's boss told the higher ups that work at headquarters he has been briefing everyone on procedures, but the boss hasn't even made it to the office. Headquarters has been notified that the employees haven't been briefed yet so hopefully that changes in the next few days. In the meantime I did double check to make sure all our very important papers and passports were all together and easy to grab if needed. We stocked up on food (we keep 3-5 days worth of pantry/shelf stable foods in case of earthquakes) to ensure we had at least 2 weeks worth of food and picked up a couple cases of bottled water. We have several 5 gallon water containers that we use for our water dispenser so I made sure they are all full and I will keep them refilled. Usually, we wait until they are mostly gone to refill but it is really a bad habit since that is our earthquake water supply. We also went to the bank and pulled out some more emergency cash to keep in the safe. It isn't gaining huge interest in the bank and if there is a wide spread power outage getting money out could be difficult. 

So that is where we stand. Hopefully things ease up soon.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The biological and chemical weapons are so scary. I'm sorry your son is over there, @MarblesMom. I'm be keeping him in my thoughts. A dear friend of mine just moved to Tokyo for her husband's work, I fear for her safety too.

 

"North Korea’s Kim appears to ease rhetoric in standoff over nuclear weapons"

Spoiler

TOKYO —  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appeared to take a step back from the brink of nuclear war Tuesday, when state media reported that he would “watch a little more the foolish and stupid conduct of the Yankees.”

But, as is often the case with North Korea, the message was mixed: Kim was inspecting the missile unit tasked with preparing to strike near Guam, and photos released by state media showed a large satellite image of Andersen Air Force Base on Guam on the screen beside the leader.

“The U.S. should stop at once arrogant provocations against the DPRK and unilateral demands and not provoke it any longer,” the North Korean leader told his missile unit, according to a report from the state-run Korean Central News Agency published Tuesday.

If “the Yankees persist in their extremely dangerous reckless actions on the Korean peninsula and in its vicinity,” Kim continued, North Korea would “make an important decision as it already declared,” he said.

Kim was visiting the Strategic Force of the Korean People’s Army, the elite missile unit that — according to state media — is finalizing preparations to launch ballistic missiles into the Pacific Ocean near the American territory of Guam. A decision was due this week, a week during which the Kim regime is celebrating the ruling family with huge propaganda displays in North Korea.

Kim “praised the KPA Strategic Force for drawing up a close and careful plan . . . and examined the firing preparations for power demonstration,” the report said.

“He said that he wants to advise the U.S., which is driving the situation on the Korean peninsula into the touch-and-go situation, running helter-skelter, to take into full account gains and losses with clear head whether the prevailing situation is more unfavorable for any party,” the report quoted Kim as saying.

This came just hours after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told South Korean leaders Monday that the United States was ready to use the “full range” of its military capabilities to deal with North Korea.

But Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., speaking in Seoul, just 30 miles south of the border with North Korea, stressed that diplomacy and sanctions were the first plan of attack.

“The military dimension today is directly in support of that diplomatic and economic effort,” Dunford told reporters after meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Seoul.

“It would be a horrible thing were a war to be conducted here on the peninsula, and that’s why we’re so focused on coming up with a peaceful way ahead,” he said, according to Stars and Stripes.

“Nobody’s looking for war,” the Marine general said, according to the newspaper. But he added that the military’s job was to provide “viable military options in the event that deterrence fails.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Monday afternoon in Washington that it will be “game on” with North Korea if it hits the United States, including Guam, but he left it much more ambiguous what will happen if Pyongyang decides to shoot missiles near Guam, without attempting to hit the U.S. island territory.

“That becomes an issue that we take up, and it’s however the president chooses,” Mattis said. “You can’t make all of those kinds of decisions in advance. There is a host of things going on. There are allies we consult with, as the president made very clear last week when he talked about our allies repeatedly in his statement.”

Mattis added that he needs a “certain amount of ambiguity on this, because I’m not going to tell [Kim] what I’m going to do in each case.” But he warned pointedly: “You don’t shoot at people in this world unless you want to bear the consequences.”

Dunford was on the first stop of a trip that will also take him to Beijing on Tuesday and then to Tokyo, three capitals that do not want war to break out on their doorsteps.

China, meanwhile, signaled a potentially important break with North Korea as part of international sanctions. Beijing announced Monday that it would ban imports of iron ore, iron, lead and coal from North Korea, cutting an important economic lifeline for Pyongyang. The ban will take effect from Tuesday, China’s Ministry of Commerce announced.

In the meetings with the South Korean president and other top officials Monday, Dunford appeared to offer a modified version of the threats that President Trump has issued over the past week.

Trump last week warned North Korea that it would face “fire and fury” if it tried to attack the United States or its allies. Then on Friday, after North Korea threatened to launch missiles toward Guam, Trump warned the regime that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded.”

But top administration officials appear focused on trying to play down the prospect of nuclear war. Appearing on Sunday-morning talk shows, CIA Director Mike Pompeo said, “An attack from North Korea is not something that is imminent.” National security adviser H.R. McMaster said, “We’re not closer to war than a week ago.”

“The object of our peaceful pressure campaign is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a joint op-ed article published by the Wall Street Journal. “The U.S. has no interest in regime change or accelerated reunification of Korea. We do not seek an excuse to garrison U.S. troops north of the Demilitarized Zone. We have no desire to inflict harm on the long-suffering North Korean people, who are distinct from the hostile regime in Pyongyang.”

Officials in the South Korean government have voiced surprise and confusion at Trump’s tough talk of the past week.

Moon, elected as South Korea’s president in May on a pledge to adopt a more conciliatory approach to North Korea, urged the United States on Monday to give diplomacy a chance.

“Peace will not come to the Korean Peninsula by force. Although peace and negotiation are painful and slow, we must pursue this path,” Moon told his advisers ahead of his meeting with Dunford.

Calling the U.S.-South Korea military partnership “an alliance for peace,” Moon said he was “confident that the U.S. will respond calmly and responsibly to the current situation.” He even suggested that the gap between the allies was not large, as both are focused on peace.

Seoul, a vibrant metropolitan area of 25 million people, lies within range of North Korea’s conventional artillery, stationed just across the border 30 miles to the north. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, including more than 28,000 U.S. troops, also live in South Korea.

After the meeting, Moon’s spokesman said the president had “denounced” North Korea for disturbing the peace in the region with its repeated missile launches.

“The president noted the current security conditions on the Korean Peninsula constituted a more serious, real and urgent threat than ever created by the advancement in North Korea’s nuclear and missile technologies,” said spokesman Park Soo-hyun.

The U.S. and South Korean militaries next week are set to start their annual fall exercises, in which they practice responding to a North Korean invasion or the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang. North Korea always strongly objects to the drills, viewing them as a pretext for war.

Gen. Vincent Brooks, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, said the exercises would go ahead as planned, starting Aug. 21. “The exercises remain important to us, and we’ll continue to move forward,” he said, according to Stars and Stripes.

 

[GrumpyGran]

I have always assumed the chemical weapons are his way of keeping everyone in line. I imagine he has used them there and made sure everyone saw the effects. Explains why everyone there is so docile and conforming. You can't even muster a crowd of demonstrators, much less organize a coup if he just vaporizes them all instantly.

And I'm sure he would not hesitate to "share" those with South Korea. Maybe this is why Trump's rhetoric cooled. Someone told him that there is a South Korea and they're our friends. Not to mention a strategic military asset.

[Cartmann99]

Damn!

Quote

North Korea has appeared to have conducted a sixth nuclear test.

Seismological data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) showed that an explosion caused a 6.3-magnitude tremor in the country's northeast, not far from the country's Punggey-ri nuclear test site.

South Korea's Meteorological Administration called it a "man-made" earthquake.

[...]

Japan Meteorological Agency also observed a magnitude-6.1 tremor in North Korea, which showed a different waveform from a natural quake around 12:31 p.m. local (11:31 p.m. ET).

http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/03/asia/north-korea-nuclear-test/index.html

[Cartmann99]

North Korean television confirms the test:

Quote

North Korean TV says the country has successfully conducted a test of a hydrogen bomb that is meant to be loaded into an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The TV anchor announced the test’s success on Korean Central Television, hours after Seoul and Tokyo detected unusual seismic activity at North Korea’s nuclear test site. The announcer says North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un ordered the test.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/the-latest-trump-speaks-with-abe-to-pressure-n-korea/2017/09/02/1aa5ec6c-904a-11e7-9c53-6a169beb0953_story.html?utm_term=.a56d505966a6

[Howl]

Thanks for that link, @Cartmann99.  South Korea's voice seems to be missing in most articles about NK.  I'm sure South Korea has some GREAT ideas about what needs to happen in dealing with NK and I'm sure the per capita consumption of the Korean version of Valium and Xanax has skyrocketed while this plays out.  Seoul is a city of 11 million people 35 miles from the DMZ with North Korea.  Yeah, like from Palo Alto to San Francisco.  Like that. 

Edited September 3, 2017 by Howl

[GrumpyGran]

Here we go again. I worry that Dumpy won't be able to handle this well. He is probably exhausted from almost non-stop presidentin'. No golf for quite a while so he is on edge. His trip yesterday might have given him a boost, he probably got good reviews from his people and the people he met seemed to have shown gratitude to him.

I hope the people around him can keep him in check and off twitter.

I actually feel bad for Tillerson.   

[apple1]

8 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Here we go again. I worry that Dumpy won't be able to handle this well. He is probably exhausted from almost non-stop presidentin'. No golf for quite a while so he is on edge. His trip yesterday might have given him a boost, he probably got good reviews from his people and the people he met seemed to have shown gratitude to him.

I hope the people around him can keep him in check and off twitter.

I actually feel bad for Tillerson.   

He's already been on Twitter about this. :-( Ivanka needs to take his phone away.

Gah.