North Korea

"Donald J Trump - 'The United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.'

The nations are:

China, India, Philippines, Taiwan, France, Mozambique, Russia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Mexico, Germany, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Chile."

https://twitter.com/AkiPeritz/status/904385928826904576

"Sec Def said, US is 'not looking to the total annihilation' of North Korea, but added, 'we have many options to do so."

https://twitter.com/starsandstripes/status/904430409383112704

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

Its actually  happening in 2017 but Canada and the USA will refuse to sign (after Sept 20) but the large majority of the UN has voted Yes.

What did or will DPRK say?

..n. korea won't sign on. they did vote to move the process forward though while the us and can boycotted it and encouraged others not to sign. 

..to me this says n. korea won't rid itself of the only way of warding off the us.  

eta:

quote:

There were incredible obstacles in our way. We were challenging power. In response, many forces of that power were unleashed upon us—politically, and sometimes personally. In her closing statement, Ambassador Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko of South Africa noted the “an incredible amount of pressure” on her continent not to participate. We saw this pressure placed on many countries in October before the General Assembly voted to begin these negotiations. We saw it even when states were organising conferences to examine the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons.

But Hillary!

[quote=bekayne]

But Hillary!

[quote=NDPP]

Clinton Vowed To 'Ring' China With Missiles Over North Korea Threat Leaked Emails Say

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/14/clinton-vowed-to-ring-china-w...

"You know, we all have told the Chinese if they [North Korea] continue to develop this missile program and they get an ICBM that has the capacity to carry a small nuclear weapon on it, which is what they're aiming to do, we cannot abide that,' Mrs Clinton told a Goldman Sachs conference..."

For Trump and the US right, breaking the nuclear taboo has always been thinkable

In November 1950, when North Korean forces had the US military on the run, President Truman held an infamous press conference during which he threatened to declare nuclear war.

After a bland statement and several minutes of to and fro over diplomatic issues, one journalist asked whether the US was about to use its nuclear weapons. Truman stated not only that an attack was under active consideration but also that “the military commander in the field” would decide whether to hit military or civilian targets. He did not rule out attacking targets in China, either.

Calamity ensued. Support for the intervention in Korea ebbed away – among the US’s allies, at the UN and among the electorate. The event became a textbook example of how not to do nuclear diplomacy – one followed until August 2017, when President Trump made his “fire and fury” threats against Pyongyang....

Quote:

Is the ultimate goal to get US nukes into South Korea?

Kind of a silly goal, seeing as they had them there, but removed them in 1991.  Guess what President removed them?  Bush Sr.!  Go figure.

Yes, they were removed as part of a denuclearization agreement being negotiated between the then governments of Seoul and Pyongyang.

Quote:

I did not intentionally spell it as Jews do.

You didn't intentionally spell it as everyone else does either.  D_ y_u mistake an undersc_re for an "o" _ften?

NDPP wrote:

US Provoking Conflict With Korea To Justify THAAD Deployment - Assange

https://sptnkne.ws/fuGz

"South Korea is China's Cuba. By provoking conflict with the North, US is creating cover to place THAAD etc on China's border...Is the ultimate goal to get US nukes into South Korea? If so expect China to act. It has plenty of economic and military levers..."

I think that it is unlikely that South Koreans would accept nukes. North Korea is a bit too close to even use them without harm to South Korea even if you factor out retaliation. As well the idea of "US" nukes makes the issue even more clear. The only reason South Korea might want to have nukes, in my view, would be to be less dependent on the US which has been exposed as having a severe conflict of interest when it comes to its own defence vs the defence of South Korea. I think at this point it is unlikely that SK would want to have that kind of weapon in the hands of a foreign power on their territory. It is also worth noticing that many in SK think of Trump as a dangerous and unstable President and are uncomfortable with him calling the shots.

South Korea also has an ability to engage with China that the US may lack given their desire to avoid escalation and their mutual lack of trust that the US could be on the same page.

The proximity of Seoul to conventional weapons of the North is a major consideration as everybody can see.

Photos From A Week in the DPRK  -  by Rabble contributor Eva Bartlett

https://ingaza.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/photos-from-a-week-in-the-dprk/

"Why doesn't someone put sanctions on America?"

Mr. Magoo wrote:

Quote:

I did not intentionally spell it as Jews do.

You didn't intentionally spell it as everyone else does either.  D_ y_u mistake an undersc_re for an "o" _ften?

Only when I am trying to confuse a certain Mr. Mag_o. :)

Can The BRICS Hold Back War With North Korea?

https://on.rt.com/8m1x

"As Russia and its BRICS partners convene this week, the organization faces a momentous test of its global influence: can it hold the line and insist on a diplomatic solution to the alarming US standoff with North Korea?"

Will US Threats Against North Korea Yield A Global Catastrophe?

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/09/06/pers-s06.html

"...Will Washington go to war to make good on its war rhetoric? Have the threats themselves and the determination to prove they are no mere bluffs - become a driving force in the march to a potential nuclear war?

There is no public opposition to the drive to war. One would hardly guess that there are people alive today in North Korea who can remember the US [and Canadian!] 65 years ago in which some 3 million people lost their lives, the great majority  of these in the north..."

epaulo13 wrote:

Isn't that him signing the Test Ban Treaty?

"Talks Can Work": As Tensions Rise on Korean Peninsula, Advocates Call for Demilitarization

Wol-san Liem joins us from Democracy Now! video stream, director of international and Korean Peninsula affairs, KCTU-Korean Public Service and Transport Workers Union. Liem just came from protesting at the THAAD deployment site in South Korea. And in Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist, author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence. He grew up in Tokyo and Seoul, has been writing about the U.S. role in Korea since the late ’70s, correspondent for The Nation and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism in Seoul. His new piece for The Nation, "Diplomacy with North Korea Has Worked Before, and Can Work Again."

quote:

WOL-SAN LIEM: The situation in Korea is that, since last year, the United States and the South Korean government authorities and military authorities have been moving to deploy, and have gone through with the deployment, of this THAAD missile defense system, which is a missile defense system that is supposed to be designed to shoot down missiles, including nuclear warheads, in the terminal phase, and so as they enter. And the argument behind that from the United States and the South Korean government is that this is being used as a deterrent or as protection against North Korean—the threat of North Korean nuclear weapons. But there’s a lot of evidence out there that shows that these missile defenses actually, and particularly THAAD, is actually not effective against most missiles, and particularly not from North Korean missiles that would be targeted at South Korea at such a short range. And the—one of the main issues here is that this system, this missile—this is actually—it’s a weapons system, really, because it’s part of a larger strategy for U.S. military buildup in the region.

But they also have recognized that this weapons system is actually exacerbating tensions with South—between South Korea and North Korea, and then also with China, who feels very threatened by the fact that you can use this system—in fact, the radar that is part of the system—to monitor the entire Chinese airspace, as well as North Korea.

quote:

WOL-SAN LIEM: I mean, I definitely echo what Tim just said. I think it’s incredibly dangerous, the war of words, the threat of preemptive strike, which Trump has—preemptive nuclear strike, which Trump has referenced several times, or other, you know, raining fire and fury down on North Korea, as it clearly exacerbates the situation. And I think that because Trump is really unpredictable and does things that are not so calculated, sometimes it makes the situation even more dangerous.

I wanted to mention that this is really—and I think that Tim also alluded to it, but this is really—the crisis that we’re experiencing now, while it’s exacerbated by the Trump administration incredibly, it’s also part of the product of a long-term history of the United States’ hostile policies towards North Korea, stemming back from the Cold War. And so, North Korea’s nuclear development, while I definitely don’t want to justify it, it is—it is the result of a sense of a threat that the United States will at some point use nuclear weapons or conventional weapons against it to try to achieve regime change. This is because the United States maintains a policy of preemptive strike against North Korea and because of the war exercises, that you mentioned, conducted with South Korea every year, that particularly target—I mean, the target of the exercises is an attack on the North Korean leadership. And so, because of that, this sense of—this understandable sense, if you listen—if you think about it, this understandable sense of threat, North Korea has felt that unless it wants to be another Iraq, it has to develop nuclear weapons in order to have some kind of defense against a much greater power, that is the United States.

And what North Korea ultimately wants is normalization of relations and a peace treaty to end the conflict on the Korean Peninsula. There was—at the end of the Korean War in 1952, there was an armistice signed, not a peace treaty. And so, in fact, there’s still a state of war going on, and North Korea has been explicit that it wants a peace treaty and normalization of relations.

John Pilger Discusses US Threats Against North Korea

https://t.co/qeqmuPNxGa

"The threat is from USA, which for more than 2 generations has bullied and provoked North Korea..."

Quote:

Like the United States, North Korea has the right to test and develop as many weapons as it chooses.

Oh, OK.  I had (erroneously) thought there were treaties regarding testing, underground testing, stockpiling and so on.  But if it's a free-for-all then, very well!

Hello everyone, I hope you all are all well.

In the end it’s going to be up to the South Korean people as to how they want to defend themselves against a nuclear armed North Korea that thinks it can use those weapons to act as political leverage on South Korea.

So I’m going to make a long range prediction here… in the end, as a result of North Korea nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems development (for whatever reason) that no one can really stop, South Korea is going to end up building some kind of national based missile defense system that they control and a small nuclear deterrent force under their jurisdiction that would free them up from having to depend on the USA using nuclear weapons.

What the rest of the world thinks is irrelevant.

How are you going to "Shut [North Korea] down"? Any attempt to destabilize Pyongyang could result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in South Korea. It is a stalemate.

The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 - 1960

The American Air War and the Destruction of North Korea

The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US and UN forces, was for Koreans a total war. The human and material resources of North and South Korea were used to their utmost. The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.1 The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others.  American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea --  that is, essentially on North Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.2 The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.3

The act which inflicted the greatest loss of civilian life in the Korean War by far, one which the North Koreans have claimed ever since was America’s greatest war crime, was the aerial bombardment of North Korean population centers.  American control of the skies over Korea was overwhelming. Soviet MIGs, flown by Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean pilots, were sometimes effective against American air power. But under Stalin’s orders, the Soviet fighter planes were strictly limited in number and in the range they were allowed to fly, lest US-Soviet air battles lead to a larger war.4 And in any case, Soviet air support did not come until the end of 1950. During the summer and fall, North Korean air defenses were virtually non-existent.  Lightly armed, local self-defense units in occupied South Korea could only watch and suffer as their towns and villages were obliterated from the air.5 By the end of the war, North Korea claimed that only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang.

For the Americans, strategic bombing made perfect sense, giving advantage to American technological prowess against the enemy’s numerical superiority. The American command dismissed British concerns that mass bombardment would turn world opinion against them, insisting that air attacks were accurate and civilian casualties limited.6 Russian accusations of indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets did not register with the Americans at all. But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The DPRK government never forgot the lesson of North Korea’s vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again. The long-term psychological effect of the war on the whole of North Korean society cannot be overestimated. The war against the United States, more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats that would continue long after the war’s end....

quote:

North Korea had been virtually destroyed as an industrial society, and the first priority of the DPRK leadership was to re-build industry. Within days of the armistice, Kim Il Sung sent a report to the Soviet embassy in Pyongyang, detailing the extent of war damage and the need for Soviet assistance to rehabilitate North Korea’s industrial economy.  “Fraternal” aid to the DPRK began during the Korean War. Of course the great bulk of direct military assistance came from the USSR and China, but the East European “People’s Democracies” also contributed to the war effort with logistical support, technical aid, medical supplies and the like. Among the most poignant forms of assistance was the taking in of thousands of Korean war orphans. Romania alone reportedly sheltered some 1,500 of these children, who were returned to the DPRK with the completion of North Korea’s 1957 – 1961 Five-Year Plan. The first group of 205 Korean children were sent to the GDR in January 1953. These and hundreds of others were also returned to North Korea several years later.

Kim Il Sung led a delegation to Moscow in September 1953, primarily to settle the terms of Soviet assistance. The Soviet government agreed to cancel or postpone repayment for all of North Korea’s outstanding debts, and reiterated its promise to give the DPRK one billion rubles in outright aid, both monetary and in the form of industrial equipment and consumer goods. Soviet technicians were sent to North Korea to help with the rehabilitation effort. The bulk of factory reconstruction in post-war North Korea was supervised by Soviet experts. Pyongyang also received promises of aid from East European countries and the Mongolian People’s Republic, the latter promising to send North Korea some 86,500 head of livestock. The third-largest contributor of external assistance after the Soviet Union and China was East Germany, which played a major role in the rebuilding of Hamhŭng, North Korea’s second-largest city and an important industrial center,.

Kim visited Beijing in November and received similarly generous pledges from the PRC, reflecting in part the Chinese government’s interest in competing with the USSR for influence in North Korea. China cancelled North Korea’s debts from the Korean War, and offered the DPRK 800 million yuan in aid for the period 1954 – 1957, of which 300 million would come in the first year. North Korea and China also signed an agreement on economic and cultural cooperation similar to the one signed between the DPRK and USSR in March 1949. China helped North Korea in factory reconstruction, although not on the scale that the USSR did, and became a major source for North Korean consumer goods, including textiles, cotton, and foodstuffs. Chinese technical experts went to North Korea, and Koreans traveled to China for technical training. But perhaps the most important contribution that China made to North Korea’s reconstruction, in addition to monetary aid and debt cancellation, was the manpower supplied by Chinese People’s Volunteer (CPV) troops who remained in North Korea until 1958. These troops, who numbered in the thousands, helped repair roads and rail lines damaged by war and rebuild schools, bridges, tunnels and irrigation dams. In labor-short North Korea, the physical assistance of Chinese People’s Volunteers was invaluable for the rehabilitation of the war-damaged infrastructure.

Rev Pesky wrote:

What becomes clear in examining all these cases is that the rule maker is the USA. If the USA says you can have nuclear weapons, you can have nuclear weapons. If they say you can't, you can't. There are no principles, and no other rules.

Preach it, Rev.

Quote:

If the USA says you can have nuclear weapons, you can have nuclear weapons. If they say you can't, you can't. There are no principles, and no other rules.

It was gracious of them to permit the Soviet Union/Russia, China, Pakistan and India.

I do find this whole "it's only fair" and "self-defense" argument kind of odd and somewhat antithetical to the usual progressive belief that there's no such thing as a good nuclear weapon.

If DPRK needs nukes because the US has nukes, then I need a gun, because criminals have guns.  Right?  Or why not?

Quote:

As US Threatens War Against North Korea

Uh, is that REALLY what happened??

North Korea shows Guam attack in new video as it warns of 'merciless revenge' against US over drills

Quote:

North Korea has unveiled a propaganda video of its threat to fire missiles near the US territory of Guam as it threatened the US with “merciless revenge” for ignoring Pyongyang’s warnings over annual military drills with South Korea.

Displaying images of Donald Trump staring at a cemetery filled with crosses and Vice-President Mike Pence enveloped by flames, the nearly 4 minute video showed the island of Guam being targeted by intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

Mike Pence enveloped by flames.  Hehe.

Anyhoo, ya, the U.S. needs to lay off the bellicose silly talk.  Clearly, DPRK is comitted to peace.  Why can't Trump JUST BE MORE LIKE THEM?

From Bec.De.Corbin:

North Korea is going to have a nuclear weapon dispite the USA (and other nations) saying no; Iran as well. Sactions are nothing to these nations. Your argument holds very little water.

​Okay, a nation may be able to develop nuclear weapons despite the wishes of the USA. But my premise is that it is the USA who decides those who have 'permission' and those who don't. I may change my mind when I hear the United Nations demanding access to Israeli nuclear facilities to check on their progress towards nuclear weapons, as they have done with others in the past.