North Korea would use nuclear weapons in a 'merciless offensive'

Source: AP

North Korea today said it would use nuclear weapons in a "merciless offensive" if provoked — its latest bellicose rhetoric apparently aimed at deterring any international punishment for its recent atomic test blast.

The tensions emanating from Pyongyang are beginning to hit nascent business ties with the South: a Seoul-based fur manufacturer became the first South Korean company to announce Monday it was pulling out of an industrial complex in the North's border town of Kaesong. The complex, which opened in 2004, is a key symbol of rapprochement between the two Koreas but the goodwill is evaporating quickly in the wake of North Korea's nuclear test on May 25 and subsequent missile tests.

Pyongyang raised tensions a notch by reviving its rhetoric in a commentary in the state-run Minju Joson newspaper today. "Our nuclear deterrent will be a strong defensive means...as well as a merciless offensive means to deal a just retaliatory strike to those who touch the country's dignity and sovereignty even a bit," said the commentary, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It appeared to be the first time that North Korea referred to its nuclear arsenal as "offensive" in nature. Pyongyang has long claimed that its nuclear weapons program is a deterrent and only for self-defense against what it calls US attempts to invade it.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-korea-would-use-nuclear-weapons-in-a-merciless-offensive-1700590.html

"Threaten me and I will DEEESTROY YOU!"

NK would be blown off the map in a minute.

The only people N Korea could nuke today are those dumb enough to be sealed in abandoned mine shafts with some of N Korea's barely functional nukes

imprisoned souls to be vaporized as guinea pigs in his nuclear tests I would'nt
make fun of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

that's what scares the shit out of me with North Korea. There is no chance of them winning a nuclear conflict with any US/Russian Ally, but the idea of "revolutionary suicide" may seem more appealing to this cult nation than we would like to admit.

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Of course, this is just typical bluster from NK.

"It appeared to be the first time that North Korea referred to its nuclear arsenal as "offensive" in nature."

I guess we have to hope it is just bluster and not a statement of intent.

There is a bright line directly from Kim's statement to the invasion of Iraq. The is only one place on the planet where that isn't immediately apparent.

kim is an idiot and will bu lucky if he does not start a bloody war.

It's tough to bluff when everyone sees your hand, and since the UN weapons inspectors had verified that Saddam didn't have any of those dreaded "weapons of mass destruction" (thank you, Babylon 5), Bush felt perfectly safe launching an illegal invasion. It doesn't appear that Kim is bluffing. And nobody seems too anxious to invade North Korea.

we will kill them all in a response. As will china or russia if they launch at them.

He's guarding against invasion, not looking to start something, in my opinion. He's making a nice play for his own country by appearing to beard the lions, but I don't think he's seriously looking for an exchange of nuclear armaments, knowing that he's got (maybe) one or two arrows in his quiver while the real nuclear powers have hundreds.

The stupid thing for the U.S. or any other real nuclear power would be to get too jazzed about Kim's braggadoccio. We or someone else could quickly get into a situation where we might have to follow through or be humiliated. Kim doesn't have to worry about being humiliated, because nobody takes him very seriously in the first place.

The chance that the cold weather would cause problems with the o-rings was judged to be very small. The problem, of course, was that the chance of a problem wasn't nonzero, and the outcome if there was a misjudgment was total annihilation of the craft and death of all aboard. In other words, the nearly infinite risk/probability ratio was not comprehended.

Same thing here with DPRK. You say, "Kim may be crazy, but I don't think he's stupid." Sounds reasonable to me. The problem, of course, is that the chance of a problem isn't nonzero, and the outcome if there is a misjudgment is nuclear war, with unknowable outcomes, catastrophic in any reading.

You're willing that we take a good guess about Kim's stability, and count it as sound decision-making. When the literal fate of the world may be in play, that's not good enough.

I think based on what I've read, he doesn't have the delivery capablity yet. That would be the big problem right there. In terms of technology, the North Koreans are really hurting to try to keep up with and buy the latest stuff but they can't because of the sanctions.

His country would look like the surface of the moon within an hour of Obama giving the order.



You don't fuck with nukes.

But then what happens to the US when China and Russia retaliate with nukes aimed the US ?

both Russia and China are aligned with the rest of the world when it comes to N. Korea's recent threats. Neither Nation is about to back N. Korea should they attack Japan or S. Korea.

if they chose that action they would all die to a man woman and child. That is the explicit design of the system. To kill everyone in those countries in 30 minutes or less.. That is why there are 18 ohio class subs, thousands of gravity bombs, and icbms all over the midwest. They know that.

Why would china jump in on a nuclear war started by n korea? Maybe they would lob a few down there. They just dont want all the refugees, that would solve the problem wouldn't it?

Neither of them wants an all out war and because of our treaty obligations, if NK nuked either country, we would respond.

I don't think it would work out too well for them.

Nuclear War in Asia Would Trigger Climate Catastrophe

By Markus Becker

What consequences would a nuclear war between Israel and Iran, or between Pakistan and India, have for the world's climate? Scientists have now created a computer model of what might happen. The results are alarming -- even for experts.

During the Cold War, a nuclear conflict was the No. 1 nightmare scenario -- one explored by scientists right down to the last detail. Today things have changed: The most significant danger is posed by a small-scale nuclear conflict between states such as India and Pakistan -- or by a nuclear attack launched from Iran or North Korea. Both countries are well on their way toward developing nuclear weapons. Until now, it was unclear what consequences such a conflict would have for the rest of the world. A new study from researchers in the United States offers the first estimation of the risks involved.

Researchers based at four separate US universities have used modern climate models to calculate the damage the smoke from burning cities, the pollution of the atmosphere and the radioactive fallout caused by a small-scale nuclear war in the region would entail. The scientists assumed a nuclear clash involving a total of 100 nuclear weapons, each of them with an explosive force equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT -- roughly the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Led by Owen Toon from the University of Colorado in Boulder, one of the teams started by calculating the damage caused by the nuclear explosions in cities and the consequent release of dust particles into the atmosphere. Five million tons of dust would enter the atmosphere, Toon and his colleagues write in the professional journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions.

Full article: www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,454571,00.html

-- --- --

The Effect of Nuclear War on Climate Change

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a series of scientific papers published by Soviet scientists and Western scientists (including "rock star" scientists Dr. Carl Sagan, host of the PBS "Cosmos" TV series, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen) laid out the dire consequences on global climate of a major nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. The nuclear explosions would send massive clouds of dust high into the stratosphere, blocking so much sunlight that a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter">nuclear winter would result. Global temperatures would plunge 20° C to 40° C for several months, and remain 2-6° C lower for 1-3 years. Up to 70% of the Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer would be destroyed, allowing huge doses of ultraviolet light to reach the surface. This UV light would kill much of the marine life that forms the basis of the food chain, resulting in the collapse many fisheries and the starvation of the people and animals that depend it. The UV light would also blind huge numbers of animals, who would then wander sightlessly and starve. The cold and dust would create widespread crop failures and global famine, killing billions of people who did not die in the nuclear explosions.

What about a small-scale nuclear war?
The "nuclear winter" papers were widely credited with helping lead to the nuclear arms reduction treaties of the 1990s, as it was clear that we risked catastrophic global climate change in the event of a full-scale nuclear war. But even a limited nuclear war poses a significant threat to Earth's climate, according to a paper presented at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December 2006 by scientists at Rutgers University and the University of Colorado. The scientists used a sophisticated atmospheric/oceanic climate model that had a good track record simulating the cooling effects of past major volcanic eruptions, such as the Philippines' Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. The scientists injected five terragrams of soot particles into the model atmosphere over Pakistan in May of 2006. This amount of smoke, they argued, would be the likely result of a limited nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized bombs in the region.



Figure 1. Global average temperature departure from normal since 1880 (top) and A.D. 1000 (bottom) in black, and those projected after a limited nuclear exchange of 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons in 2006 (in red). Temperatures are forecast to plunge 1.2° C (2.2° F) after such a war, reaching levels colder than anything seen in the past 1000 years. The 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia produced a similar cooling, and led to the notorious "Year Without a Summer". Image credit: "Climatic consequences of a regional nuclear conflicts" by Robock et al., 2006.

The black smoke, they found, absorbed far more solar radiation than the brighter sulfuric acid particles emitted by volcanic eruptions. This allowed the smoke to heat the surrounding air to much higher temperatures, resulting in stronger upward motion of the smoke particles higher into the stratosphere. Once the smoke reached the stratosphere, where there is no rain to rain out the soot particles, it stayed at significantly high levels for over a decade. The black soot blocked sunlight, resulting in global cooling of over 1.2° C (2.2° F) for two years, and 0.5° C (0.9° F) for more than a decade.

This magnitude of this cooling would bring about the coldest temperatures observed on the globe in over 1000 years (Figure 1). The growing season would shorten by 10-30 days over much of the globe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The effects would be similar to what happened after the greatest volcanic eruption in historic times, the 1815 Tambora eruption in Indonesia. This cooling from this eruption triggered the infamous Year Without a Summer in 1816 in the Northern Hemisphere, when killing frosts disrupted agriculture every month of the summer in New England, creating terrible hardship. Exceptionally cold and wet weather in Europe triggered widespread harvest failures, resulting in famine and economic collapse. However, the cooling effect of this eruption only lasted about a year. Cooling from a limited nuclear exchange would create two to three consecutive "Years Without a Summer", and over a decade of significantly reduced crop yields. The authors anticipated that the smoke in the stratosphere would partially destroy Earth's protective stratospheric ozone layer as well, but did not model how large of an impact this would have. Clearly, even a limited nuclear exchange could trigger severe global climate change capable of causing economic chaos and widespread starvation.

From: http://www.wunderground.com/education/nuke.asp

So what would a smart person do? What they seem to want, or the opposite?

China doesn't want an unstable N. Korea.
China doesn't want a Democratic Korea either so they wouldn't like it if we did do anything.
I wouldn't be surprised if N. Korea didn't hit Japan or S. Korea with a dirty bomb. Waiting until after they do it to do something about it may be stupid.

I think the best option would be for China to go into N. Korea and do a regime change with force. That way N. Korea stays Communist but becomes stable and peaceful too.

They are obviously best placed to deal with it.

I think the current "leaders" of N. Korea are corrupt weasels, so it's hard to know what they might do, but they seem a lot more fond of making threats than carrying them out, so I'd tend to ignore their "threats" and find quiet ways to cramp their style, which should not be that hard to do.

Welcome to DU.
:hi: