North Korea

At the risk of sounding compeltely stupid here, I just read on the BBC this:

Reaching an altitude of about 770km (478 miles), it travelled 3,700km before landing in the sea off Hokkaido, South Korea's military says.

An altitude of 478 miles? Isnt that more launching a rocket into space?
 
I feel bad for Japan who is caught in danger because of all those missiles this guy is firing. Not that North Korea cares a damn, but is this even legal to fire missiles which may fall on foreign soil if it runs into any glitches.
 
At the risk of sounding compeltely stupid here, I just read on the BBC this:



An altitude of 478 miles? Isnt that more launching a rocket into space?
yes...

i think the show here is that the higher a rocket goes up the more vertical it comes down making it much harder to shoot down with most anti missile tech (patriots etc) - also the total distance covered is pretty much the same as the distance to guam... its basically saying we can drop a missile on guam and you have virtually no chance of stopping it
 
Is Kim fatty suicidal or what? Why he is doing these things? Imagine if something malfunctions and the rocket hits Japan. The consequences would be catastrophic and on best case scenario, Japan would immediately start developing their nukes (they probably have a lot of them stockpiled, anyway) which could have terrible consequences (and Japan can do it extremely fast).
Japan don't have any nukes. They have lot of lot of warfare equipment, but no nukes. They are dead against stockpiling of nukes by any country.
 
Considering how irrational this guy is, I wouldn't be surprised if he went out of missile by repeatedly hitting a bunch of them into the ocean for months.
 
Is Kim fatty suicidal or what? Why he is doing these things? Imagine if something malfunctions and the rocket hits Japan. The consequences would be catastrophic and on best case scenario, Japan would immediately start developing their nukes (they probably have a lot of them stockpiled, anyway) which could have terrible consequences (and Japan can do it extremely fast).

He's exactly the opposite of suicidal. It's a common line for the Western media to portray the North Korean regime as insane, but everything they do is very calculated and with an ultimate objective of securing the survival of their reprehensible regime. It's worth remembering, for all powerful countries, the quality of appearing irrational and volatile can sometimes be desirable.

The certain obliteration of millions of people is a dire enough consequence to rule out the military option in any scenario aside from Kim launching a premptive attack on the South/US/Japan (which I don't believe he'll do).

There's obviously no guarantee that once the North has developed the capability to splash a nuke down on any US city, they'll suddenly become a benign entity. However, I can imagine that they might at that point feel sufficiently secure to come in from the cold and join the negotiating table, safe in the knowledge that the US will have no choice but to treat them as a major player. I assume that's their ultimate goal here.

North Korea has for a long time been willing to join the negotiating table, it's Washington that has refused to do so. They want the problem settled, but remain unwilling to agree to anything resembling a quid pro quo thus far. Bush is to blame for the present mess, but his successors have done nothing to ameliorate the situation.
 
Considering how irrational this guy is, I wouldn't be surprised if he went out of missile by repeatedly hitting a bunch of them into the ocean for months.

I've thought about this too. Those are some serious missiles he's firing these days, can't believe they can really afford to build 1 a day of those.
 
Japan don't have any nukes. They have lot of lot of warfare equipment, but no nukes. They are dead against stockpiling of nukes by any country.
It is very possible that they either have stockpiled nukes, or have enough material to go full nuclear (hundreds of nukes) within a few weeks.

And to be fair, with N. Korea going nuclear, China and Russia both being quite aggressive, and a supporting US president, it is time for them to go nuclear.
 
@military experts: Why can't Seoul be protected with defensive missile shields like Tel Aviv for example?
 
@military experts: Why can't Seoul be protected with defensive missile shields like Tel Aviv for example?

Because there are far too many artillery pieces aimed at it. If this were a few one off rockets then a missile defense approach would be appropriate,but the North literally has thousands of rockets, missiles, mortars and other projectiles aimed at the South which would make it incredibly difficult to protect without mass casualties.
 
Artillary shells can't be intercepted yet and the shear number of rockets/missiles would over whelm the system

The C-Ram system can, although with the sheer volume of IDF coming in from the North, it can't be solely relied on to protect Seoul.

 
The C-Ram system can, although with the sheer volume of IDF coming in from the North, it can't be solely relied on to protect Seoul.


There's a version of that called the Phalanx system on US naval ships.

They're awesome. Can intercept low flying anti-ship missiles.
 
There's a version of that called the Phalanx system on US naval ships.

They're awesome. Can intercept low flying anti-ship missiles.

Yeah we had them all over Iraq. Couldn't use the gun in most instances for fear of shooting down a projectile that may land on civilians.
 
@military experts: Why can't Seoul be protected with defensive missile shields like Tel Aviv for example?
Tel Aviv has under half a million people
The Seoul national capital area has 50 million... about half the countries population all in artillery range...
The city it's self has circa 25 million people so I think the scale of what you would be trying to defend... plus remember this is from full on military artillery attack not a few extremist rockets ... I just don't think it's possible... even without factoring in the likelihood of some of the artillery being chemical weapons
I just don't think you could scale up the tel Aviv type solution
 
@military experts: Why can't Seoul be protected with defensive missile shields like Tel Aviv for example?

There's a big continuing debate in Israel over whether the Iron Dome defence system is actually effective at all. And that only has to handle fairly crudely made rockets floated over rather aimlessly by rag-tag groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Not comparable at all with the situation in Korea really.
 
ICBMs do that, reach suborbital space flight. It helps them get their long range

I just assumed they went to the height of an airplane or something then descended.

When Felix Baumgartner did his space jump that was 25 miles up. So 468 seems an awful long way into space in comparison.
 
I just assumed they went to the height of an airplane or something then descended.

When Felix Baumgartner did his space jump that was 25 miles up. So 468 seems an awful long way into space in comparison.

The international space station is around 300 miles high I think... Hmmm perhaps that could be his next target?
 
Much like Trump, its sort of hard to parody Kim, since his own actions are funnier than any movie could be.

 
It is very possible that they either have stockpiled nukes, or have enough material to go full nuclear (hundreds of nukes) within a few weeks.

And to be fair, with N. Korea going nuclear, China and Russia both being quite aggressive, and a supporting US president, it is time for them to go nuclear.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki will dictate that Japan never goes nuclear, ever.
 
Because there are far too many artillery pieces aimed at it. If this were a few one off rockets then a missile defense approach would be appropriate,but the North literally has thousands of rockets, missiles, mortars and other projectiles aimed at the South which would make it incredibly difficult to protect without mass casualties.
But most of them are too old and may not work, what experts say that the real trouble from nk would be the troops invading sk and trying to kill the most people possible because they know sk would defeat them. China also knows soon nk invades sk then the north side would not be a country for too long.
 
Surely the South can just move their people more south under the pretense that there's genuine cause for concern about their safety.

A ridiculously complicated thing to do but this is ridiculously complicated.
 
Where do tens of millions stay?

Surely there's like...a bit more land lower down Korea that they could go?

Give them all a holiday for a while then destroy the North because they can't kill anyone in the South if there's an attack.

I dunno. It can't be too hard surely.
 
Surely the South can just move their people more south under the pretense that there's genuine cause for concern about their safety.

A ridiculously complicated thing to do but this is ridiculously complicated.

Its beyond ridiculously complicated. Seoul is the 4th largest city in the world.
 
Its beyond ridiculously complicated. Seoul is the 4th largest city in the world.

China built huge cities for people and they're empty, the South could do the same only fill them. Job done.

Why has nobody thought of this before? I'm a foreign policy genius.
 
Surely there's like...a bit more land lower down Korea that they could go?

Give them all a holiday for a while then destroy the North because they can't kill anyone in the South if there's an attack.

I dunno. It can't be too hard surely.
And what do you imagine North Korea be doing when they see the South evacuating? After almost 80 years you do imagine the North has a decent spy network or at the very least watch SK news and social media.

Evacuating civilians from a potential war zone is one of the things intelligence services watch for as a sign the other side is about to attack.
 
Surely there's like...a bit more land lower down Korea that they could go?

Give them all a holiday for a while then destroy the North because they can't kill anyone in the South if there's an attack.

I dunno. It can't be too hard surely.
:lol:
 
Alright, let's say all these millions of Korean folk move their ass to some field somewhere just before Seoul gets wrecked. The feck they go after that?
We provide tents and get some K-Pop bands to come along. That'll buy us plenty of time.
 
Alright, let's say all these millions of Korean folk move their ass to some field somewhere just before Seoul gets wrecked. The feck they go after that?

Don't need to go anywhere. Make that field New Seoul.

Just out of the range of Kim's missiles.
 
And what do you imagine North Korea be doing when they see the South evacuating? After almost 80 years you do imagine the North has a decent spy network or at the very least watch SK news and social media.

Evacuating civilians from a potential war zone is one of the things intelligence services watch for as a sign the other side is about to attack.

Nah, you need military build up too. Just don't do anything for a bit after you've moved them, tell him Seoul is built on an Indian Burial Ground so they had to move all of it.

Bluff him into a false sense of security.