KREUZADER (Posts tagged north korea)

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Kim Jong Un Just Showed The World The War Machine He Built While Feinting Diplomacy A handful of absolutely massive new intercontinental ballistic missiles were rolled through Kim Il Sung Square. This would be the third iteration of the ICBM concept...

Kim Jong Un Just Showed The World The War Machine He Built While Feinting Diplomacy

A handful of absolutely massive new intercontinental ballistic missiles were rolled through Kim Il Sung Square. This would be the third iteration of the ICBM concept for the North Koreans, having already unveiled and tested the Hwasong HS-14 and HS-15 in 2017. This new missile looks to be a significant outgrowth of the already monstrous HS-15, which is suspected of being able to reach pretty much anywhere in the United States, although its terminal delivery capabilities remain a puzzle, as is the case for the HS-14 and other longer-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead in Pyongyang’s arsenal.

It isn’t clear if this is just a longer-ranged, more advanced evolution of the prior design, or if this is intended to deliver a heavier payload, as well, namely multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs).

Source: thedrive.com
north korea dprk nuclear weapons
Wollo-ri Nuclear Facility In 2018, some of us at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) successfully identified an alleged North Korean enrichment plant near Kangson. This discovery led us to reassess what we thought we knew about...

Wollo-ri Nuclear Facility

In 2018, some of us at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) successfully identified an alleged North Korean enrichment plant near Kangson. This discovery led us to reassess what we thought we knew about DPRK nuclear facilities.

We were surprised at how close the Kangson enrichment plant was to Pyongyang. Other known DPRK nuclear sites, such as Yongbyon, are generally located far from the capital. We were also struck by a number of features at Kangson, including what appeared to be on-site housing and monuments commemorating unpublicized leadership visits. We  believed these were possible signatures of undeclared nuclear facilities.

We set out to identify other facilities in North Korea that might have these signatures. Over the course of the past two years, we have found a number of unidentified facilities that we believe are linked to the DPRK nuclear program.

Of those facilities, one was at the top of our list: a suspected nuclear warhead manufacturing facility at Wollo-ri, located at: 39.05° N, 125.62° E. Researchers from CNS identified this facility in 2015 while searching for another site near Pyongyang. After identifying the Kangson enrichment plant,  we revisited this site. Now, in his new book Kim Jong Un and the Bomb, Ankit Panda reports that the US intelligence community assesses that there is a facility “thought to be associated with [nuclear] warhead manufacturing” near Wollo-ri.

Source: armscontrolwonk.com
north korea nuclear weapons
Revealing Kangson, North Korea’s First Covert Uranium Enrichment Site “Beginning in the early 2000s, North Korea began building a discrete, largely unnoticed, cluster of buildings, not far from the banks of the Taedong river, a few kilometers...

Revealing Kangson, North Korea’s First Covert Uranium Enrichment Site

Beginning in the early 2000s, North Korea began building a discrete, largely unnoticed, cluster of buildings, not far from the banks of the Taedong river, a few kilometers south-southeast of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Located on the eastern end of Chollima, a town best known for hosting a massive steel manufacturing complex since the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, the facility had drawn no public attention—until now.

The facility is North Korea’s first covert uranium enrichment facility, known by the U.S. intelligence community as the Kangson enrichment site. It is where, for more than a decade—possibly as long as fifteen years—North Korea has been enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons. It is older than the well-known enrichment site operated by North Korea since at least 2010 at the old Fuel Fabrication Plant at Yongbyon. The Kangson site is one of two known North Korean covert enrichment sites.

Source: thediplomat.com
north korea nuclear weapons
berniesrevolution
berniesrevolution

The policy position for a president Sanders or any Dem who gets the nomination and dares call themselves a progressive should be the continuation of the policy Trump stumbled into which is do nothing and let the two Koreas self-determine. Just without the drunken twitter threats!

All the credit to the Moon administration for rebuking Trump & Co’s threat of a preemptive strike and signaling to Kim that the South is willing to negotiate independent of any directives from Washington!

idiosyncraticwordsmith

An actual historical miracle, folks are going to look back on this moment in history as a time of hope.

stevetomjohn

Here’s some more thoughts from your resident DPRK researcher! (though take everything I say with a grain of salt, because my area is media and culture, not policy)

  • Pres. Moon has said firmly that he will not endorse a war on the peninsula, meaning that he will stop (or at least condemn) any US activity. Basically neuters Bolton and Pompeo, or at least means the US has to know it will have precisely zero friends if we attempt regime change or a “bloody nose” attack.
  • Moon is planning to go to Pyongyang in the fall, meaning that basically whatever happens with Trump could easily just be a formality while the Koreans do the actual work among themselves.
  • Korea has five-year presidential terms with a limit of one term. This means Moon Jae-In is a more important political ally than Trump, as Trump’s term is over in January 2021 (if we wise up) while Moon’s ends in 2022. There will be no other Korean president for Trump to negotiate with, but there will be a (hopefully) more diplomatically inclined American president for Moon and Kim to deal with.
  • There’s more but I have papers to write lol
north korea
The Hwasong-15: The Anatomy of North Korea’s New ICBM“On November 29, at 2:47 a.m. local time, North Korea carried out the first-ever launch of what is to date its largest and most powerful ballistic missile, the Hwasong-15. The launch ended a more...

The Hwasong-15: The Anatomy of North Korea’s New ICBM

On November 29, at 2:47 a.m. local time, North Korea carried out the first-ever launch of what is to date its largest and most powerful ballistic missile, the Hwasong-15. The launch ended a more than two-month pause in North Korean ballistic missile testing and refocused attention on the country’s rapid advances in ballistic missile technology in 2017.

Designated the KN22 by the U.S. intelligence community, the Hwasong-15 is North Korea’s second-ever liquid-fueled intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) design to see flight testing. Prior to its November 29 launch, the missile had never been seen publicly.

Source: thediplomat.com
nuclear weapons north korea
Trump Thinks Missile Defenses Work Against North Korea, and That Should Scare You“If Trump believes U.S. missile defenses work this effectively, he might actually think a first strike attempt to disarm North Korea of its missile and nuclear forces...

Trump Thinks Missile Defenses Work Against North Korea, and That Should Scare You

If Trump believes U.S. missile defenses work this effectively, he might actually think a first strike attempt to disarm North Korea of its missile and nuclear forces would successfully spare U.S. cities from North Korean nuclear retaliation. They probably wouldn’t. Believing that each ground-based midcourse missile defense (GMD) interceptor can provide anything close to a 97 percent interception rate against retaliation raises the temptation to attempt a so-called “splendid first strike” based on the assumption that missile defenses can successfully intercept any leftover missiles North Korea could then fire at the United States.

In this article, we first lay out the complexity of American missile defenses and explain why it’s way off the mark to believe U.S. ground-based missile defense interceptors are even close to as effective as Trump suggested. We then explain how overconfidence in national missile defense may tempt the president to consider a first strike with no actual guarantee that it can spare an American city — or multiple cities — from potential North Korean thermonuclear retaliation.

Source: warontherocks.com
trump north korea nuclear weapons nuclear war
The nuclear explosion in North Korea on 3 September 2017: A revised magnitude assessment“NORSAR has made a new assessment of the magnitude of the underground nuclear test explosion conducted by North Korea at its Punggye-ri test site on 3 September...

The nuclear explosion in North Korea on 3 September 2017: A revised magnitude assessment

NORSAR has made a new assessment of the magnitude of the underground nuclear test explosion conducted by North Korea at its Punggye-ri test site on 3 September 2017.

[…]

The correspondence between the seismic magnitude and explosive yield of an underground nuclear test is associated with a very large uncertainty. Empirical relations have been derived for different test sites where reference yields have been available. A common relation used is magnitude = 0.75log(yield) + k, where k is a constant representative for a given test site, including its geological conditions. As no reported and reliable reference yields are available for the North Korean test site, we have applied a k-value of 4.3, as has been advocated for the northern Novaya Zemlya test site. By applying a k-value of 4.3, we obtain a yield estimate of 250 kilotons TNT for the magnitude 6.1 event on 3 September 2017. This is an estimate with some uncertainty.

Source: norsar.no
north korea nuclear weapons
The Clear Logic of the Latest North Korean Test“So what do the North Koreans aim to get out of their ceaseless pursuit of new and more shocking demonstrations of missile and nuclear technology? In blunt terms, they want to give Washington other...

The Clear Logic of the Latest North Korean Test

So what do the North Koreans aim to get out of their ceaseless pursuit of new and more shocking demonstrations of missile and nuclear technology? In blunt terms, they want to give Washington other ideas. After observing China’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the 1960s and watching it stare down America’s “policy of hostility and imperialism” by the early 1970s, the Kim regime seems to believe it can pull off the same trick. According to Pyongyang, America must end its “hostile policy,” which translates to no more sanctions, no more condemnations on human-rights grounds, no more bomber flights and aircraft-carrier movements in its vicinity, and no more annual cycle of combined military exercises with South Korea.

In response to the Trump administration’s policy of “maximum pressure and engagement,” which so far hasn’t featured much engagement, the North Koreans have pledged to “speed up at the maximum pace the measure for bolstering its nuclear deterrence,” taking both “consecutive” and “successive” actions to that end. So far, they’ve kept that promise, testing 18 missiles in the first eight months of 2017.

Source: The Atlantic
north korea nuclear weapons
Large nuclear test in North Korea on 3 September 2017“The seismological observatory NORSAR at Kjeller, Norway, has detected the latest underground nuclear test by North Korea. NORSAR has recorded signals from an underground nuclear test conducted by...

Large nuclear test in North Korea on 3 September 2017

The seismological observatory NORSAR at Kjeller, Norway, has detected the latest underground nuclear test by North Korea.

NORSAR has recorded signals from an underground nuclear test conducted by North Korea at its Punggye-ri test site on 3 September 2017. NORSAR has estimated the explosive yield at 120 kilotons TNT, based on a seismic magnitude of 5.8.

In comparison, the explosive yield of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 was estimated at 15 kilotons TNT, while the bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later was 20 kilotons TNT.

The test site in North Korea is located at a distance of approximately 7360 km from NORSAR’s seismic station in Hedmark. Given that the seismic waves take approximately 11 minutes to propagate from North Korea to Norway, the measurements indicate that the event took place at 03:30 UTC.

Source: norsar.no
north korea nuclear weapons