How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14791393
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/d ... ans-at-any

How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans

The mainstream media, and some officials who should know better, continue to allege North Korea does not yet have capability to deliver on its repeated threats to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. False reassurance is given to the American people that North Korea has not “demonstrated” that it can miniaturize a nuclear warhead small enough for missile delivery, or build a reentry vehicle for an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of penetrating the atmosphere to blast a U.S. city...........

..........The U.S. must be prepared to preempt North Korea by any means necessary—including nuclear weapons.

Launch a crash program to harden against EMP attack the U.S. electric grid to preserve American civilization and hundreds of millions of lives. This could be part of President Trump’s infrastructure modernization project.

Beef up national missile defenses. Revive President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), the unfairly derided “Star Wars.” Space-based missile defenses could still render nuclear missiles obsolete and offer a permanent, peaceful, solution to problems like North Korea.

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The horrific problem of an EMP attack, has been ignored by politicians for far too long. It's high time to take preventative action against an EMP attack before it's too late one day.
#14791450
Even if capable of sending a warhead to reach US territory, you can be rest assured the US have a missile defence system that would easily intercept such a missile if launched And the word here is launched. Satellite surveillance by the US intelligence agency would easily know what was occuring before launch anyway. And it would give the US the upperhand in attacking first with justification to do so. Nukes are nothing more than a deterrent to defend oneself. But if you ever use them for aggressive purposes towards a nuclear superpower (with a hothead like Trump in charge of the nuclear codes), you can expect 100 times as many warheads returning towards your direction in return.
#14792043
North Korea is occupied by a delusional, unhinged despot whose inflammatory and provocative remarks have gone far past mere rhetoric and into threats to annihilate the United States and engulf the Korean peninsula in flames. North Korea is grave threat to world peace and stability. Even relations with authoritarian China have declined recently due to North Korea's belligerence and aggression which China has condemned. The fact of the matter is that a preemptive strike against North Korea and ousting the tyrannous Kim dynasty from power is key to security and stability in the region, China will not come to their aid for they view North Korea as an embarrassment. North Korea regularly harasses and attempts to cross the border to the south. North Korea illicitly supplies America's enemies such as Iran and Syria with arms. The long-suffering and beleaguered civilian masses of North Korea cry out for freedom and so the United States must engage in bombing campaigns against North Korea, destroy their industries, and break their morale.
#14792127
babygang wrote: The long-suffering and beleaguered civilian masses of North Korea cry out for freedom

They don't know they are not free, and that the rest of the world is different -- but they believe it is even worse.
and so the United States must engage in bombing campaigns against North Korea, destroy their industries, and break their morale.

NK doesn't have much in the way of industries to destroy, and bombing campaigns don't break morale. A restricted strike to remove the leadership would be the only way to go.
#14792252
Suntzu wrote:Malarky! How could a single bomb kill 300,000,000 people spread over 6,000,000 square mile? A nuclear weapon exploded at ground level would make a big hole but little damage which is why nuclear warhead are generally detonated in the air unless bunker busting.


An EMP attack would fry the electrical grid and shut down electricity in the entire 48 states. Likely for many months, and possibly years. It would also fry every modern automobile's computer system. It would fry every computer, and an assortment of other things. So...no electricity, no automobiles, no communications, no house water, no grocery store food. Should I go on and on?

Virtually everyone remaining in cities, if they couldn't get out, would be dead within a few weeks. If it was winter, it would be sooner.

The article said 90 percent, that could be too high...maybe it's only 100 to 200 million dead? But perhaps that isn't horrific enough for ya - just malarky right?
#14792283
A Hiroshima-type A-Bomb having a yield of 10-kilotons detonated in a major city would cause about 200,000 casualties from blast, thermal, and radiation effects. North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon having an estimated yield of 20-30 kilotons. The Defense Department assesses that on January 6, 2016, North Korea may have tested components of an H-Bomb. H-Bombs are much more powerful than A-Bombs and can produce much greater casualties—millions of casualties in a big city like New York.


Probably North Korea has a couple of Hiroshima-type A-Bombs which would cause about 200,000 casualties from blast in a major city. While North Korea is incapable of delivering them to mainland America, North Korea is fully capable of destroying a major Japanese city and some US territories such as Hawaii and Guam are within reach, too. North Korea has been developing nukes as an insurance policy to prevent the spread of democracy to Pyongyang and it's not interested in killing 200,000 Americans in New York. Even the mad dictator can understand the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and Japan is a safer target as it does not possess nuclear capabilities to wipe North Korea off the map in retaliation.
#14792286
The article quoted is a total fantasy and whoever wrote (R. JAMES WOOLSEY AND VINCENT PRY, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS) it apparently are idiots. Fear mongering propaganda at its worse.

This is worrying because these two people are apparently,

Ambassador R. James Woolsey was the Director of Central Intelligence from 1993-95. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry is chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, served in the House Armed Services Committee and the CIA.
.

Presumably what they're doing is using the DPRK as a vehicle for advertising the conclusions from their EMP study, (http://www.empcommission.org/) cited in the article, which tries to raise awareness about the dangers of EMP attack to the US energy grid- and basically recommends widespread modernization of US infrastructure (ie, cold war "Civil Defence") in response. I cannot imagine why they believe the US energy sector is so vulnerable (it's not as if EMP hardening was not understood by defence planners concerned about massive Soviet nuclear retaliation) and the notion that the DPRK poses this kind of existential threat to the United States is just ridiculous. EMP impact from space thermonuclear detonation was appreciated by the early 1960s following megaton range weapon detonations at 240 miles altitude. Studies revealed that while hardening was difficult, the real limitation of this kind of first-strike attack was that it invariably destroyed the attackers own systems therefore making it useless for first-strike purposes. It is doubtful the US global nuclear triad would be severely diminished by this, and thus likely that the DPRK government would be totally destroyed by US retaliation.

Stephen50right wrote:An EMP attack would fry the electrical grid and shut down electricity in the entire 48 states. Likely for many months, and possibly years. It would also fry every modern automobile's computer system. It would fry every computer, and an assortment of other things. So...no electricity, no automobiles, no communications, no house water, no grocery store food. Should I go on and on?


Well you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Were you also a contributor on this EMP commission report? The kind of cataclysmic electromagnetic event you describe would most likely be the result of a massive solar flare event, not a purposeful thermonuclear attack. Again, you completely ignore the impact against the attacker which limits the utility of the system for first-strike purposes. Furthermore, the scale of the impact you describe would require detonating a great number of thermonuclear weapons which it seems unlikely a state like DPRK could achieve.

I should add that the report itself was produced in 2008 before DPRK possessed atomic weapons and it is astonishingly dishonest to claim, almost a decade later, that this report is therefore an accurate prediction of DPRK related strategy.

https://apnews.com/4d0f8d7a66ce4d64ae639c295f4c83b8

U.S. News
North Korea accuses US of using its nukes as excuse

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — North Korea accused the United States on Thursday of using the North's nuclear program as an excuse to mask its own opposition to banning nuclear weapons.

Ri Song Chol, a counsellor at North Korea's U.N. mission, told The Associated Press that the United States drove his country to make and possess nuclear weapons to defend itself against any American aggression.

He said the United States was the first country to use nuclear weapons — against Japan during World War II — and it continues to use them "to threaten and blackmail other countries" including North Korea.

Ri said he was responding to U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley who said Monday that the United States wouldn't participate in U.N. talks aimed at banning nuclear weapons because "bad actors" wouldn't sign or comply with a potential treaty.

"North Korea would be the one cheering, and all of us and the people we represent would be the ones at risk," Haley said.

Haley was speaking before the start of U.N. talks aimed at eventually producing a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

The five nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France — refused to attend the meeting saying a ban won't work and the world should instead stick with a more gradual approach.

Ri said his country, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK, supports the global effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, but won't give up its weapons "until the denuclearization of the world is implemented."

He said the DPRK is also not taking part in the talks because of joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea using special forces and "all kinds of nuclear strategic assets" which he said are aimed at secretly invading the North to eliminate its leadership.

It is therefore an "immediate and vital requirement" for the DPRK to further strengthen its military and nuclear capabilities so it can carry out "a pre-emptive strike ... to protect the country from U.S. aggression," Ri said.

He said "it is clearly an unreasonable argument that the U.S. cannot eliminate nuclear weapons because the DPRK will not abandon its nuclear weapons."

"The deceptive talk of the U.S. representative is to hide U.S. identity as a principal offender blocking the global effort for denuclearization of the world," Ri said.


There is a very interesting "threat dynamic" taking place here, where the United States invariably requires some terrible threat to maintain its military-industrial complex (ie, it's economy). If the world ever needed proof that the threat is basically fictitious- and probably always was, from the Cold War until the present- it is the laughable attempts to equate DPRK nuclear arsenal with USSR level cold war crisis nuclear threat. This not only demonstrates that unreality of US appreciation of the "threat" but also retroactively raises concerns about the legitimacy of the historical threat itself.
#14792308
This not only demonstrates that unreality of US appreciation of the "threat" but also retroactively raises concerns about the legitimacy of the historical threat itself.

The historical threat from the Soviet Union was real enough. The Soviet Union posed a real existential threat to the United States (as the United States did to the Soviet Union), though this threat was sometimes overstated for political reasons (for example, JFK talked about a "missile gap" in the early 1960s, though no such gap existed). People still don't understand the danger the whole world was in throughout the Cold War. The present 'threat' from North Korea is risible by comparison. Why are people such hysterical pussies these days? :eh:
#14792310
MB. wrote:The article quoted is a total fantasy and whoever wrote (R. JAMES WOOLSEY AND VINCENT PRY, OPINION CONTRIBUTORS) it apparently are idiots. Fear mongering propaganda at its worse.

This is worrying because these two people are apparently,

.

Presumably what they're doing is using the DPRK as a vehicle for advertising the conclusions from their EMP study, (http://www.empcommission.org/) cited in the article, which tries to raise awareness about the dangers of EMP attack to the US energy grid- and basically recommends widespread modernization of US infrastructure (ie, cold war "Civil Defence") in response. I cannot imagine why they believe the US energy sector is so vulnerable (it's not as if EMP hardening was not understood by defence planners concerned about massive Soviet nuclear retaliation) and the notion that the DPRK poses this kind of existential threat to the United States is just ridiculous. EMP impact from space thermonuclear detonation was appreciated by the early 1960s following megaton range weapon detonations at 240 miles altitude. Studies revealed that while hardening was difficult, the real limitation of this kind of first-strike attack was that it invariably destroyed the attackers own systems therefore making it useless for first-strike purposes. It is doubtful the US global nuclear triad would be severely diminished by this, and thus likely that the DPRK government would be totally destroyed by US retaliation.



Well you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Were you also a contributor on this EMP commission report? The kind of cataclysmic electromagnetic event you describe would most likely be the result of a massive solar flare event, not a purposeful thermonuclear attack. Again, you completely ignore the impact against the attacker which limits the utility of the system for first-strike purposes. Furthermore, the scale of the impact you describe would require detonating a great number of thermonuclear weapons which it seems unlikely a state like DPRK could achieve.

I should add that the report itself was produced in 2008 before DPRK possessed atomic weapons and it is astonishingly dishonest to claim, almost a decade later, that this report is therefore an accurate prediction of DPRK related strategy.

https://apnews.com/4d0f8d7a66ce4d64ae639c295f4c83b8



There is a very interesting "threat dynamic" taking place here, where the United States invariably requires some terrible threat to maintain its military-industrial complex (ie, it's economy). If the world ever needed proof that the threat is basically fictitious- and probably always was, from the Cold War until the present- it is the laughable attempts to equate DPRK nuclear arsenal with USSR level cold war crisis nuclear threat. This not only demonstrates that unreality of US appreciation of the "threat" but also retroactively raises concerns about the legitimacy of the historical threat itself.


Stephen50right wrote:
An EMP attack would fry the electrical grid and shut down electricity in the entire 48 states. Likely for many months, and possibly years. It would also fry every modern automobile's computer system. It would fry every computer, and an assortment of other things. So...no electricity, no automobiles, no communications, no house water, no grocery store food. Should I go on and on?


<<< Well you obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Were you also a contributor on this EMP commission report? The kind of cataclysmic electromagnetic event you describe would most likely be the result of a massive solar flare event, not a purposeful thermonuclear attack. Again, you completely ignore the impact against the attacker which limits the utility of the system for first-strike purposes. Furthermore, the scale of the impact you describe would require detonating a great number of thermonuclear weapons which it seems unlikely a state like DPRK could achieve.

I should add that the report itself was produced in 2008 before DPRK possessed atomic weapons and it is astonishingly dishonest to claim, almost a decade later, that this report is therefore an accurate prediction of DPRK related strategy. >>>

The political events which could lead to an EMP attack are of course debatable. However the consequences of an EMP attack are not debatable. It is scientific fact.

You made some interesting political points, some of which I agree, some of which I disagree. However you display a fundamental lack of understanding about an EMP attack. Google EMP attack and educate yourself, or remain blissfully ignorant, the choice is yours.

I have read numerous articles about an EMP attack. The mass destruction and murder is real, which is exactly why North Korea and Iran are attempting to accomplish the ability to launch one.
#14792311
Stephen50right wrote:However the consequences of an EMP attack are not debatable. It is scientific fact.

You made some interesting political points, some of which I agree, some of which I disagree. However you display a fundamental lack of understanding about an EMP attack. Google EMP attack and educate yourself, or remain blissfully ignorant, the choice is yours.

I have read numerous articles about an EMP attack. The mass destruction and murder is real, which is exactly why North Korea and Iran are attempting to accomplish the ability to launch one.


You should have no problem then reproducing the exact number of warheads, their yield, and the height of their detonation, required to disable the entire US energy grid, not to mention, "every car and computer".

Well?
#14792352
MB. wrote:You should have no problem then reproducing the exact number of warheads, their yield, and the height of their detonation, required to disable the entire US energy grid, not to mention, "every car and computer".

Well?


http://www.futurescience.com/emp.html

From the article:

The magnitude of the effect of an EMP attack on the United States, or any similar advanced country, will remain unknown until one actually happens. Unless the device is very small or detonated at an insufficiently high altitude, it is likely that it would knock out the nearly the entire electrical power grid of the United States. It would destroy many other electrical and (especially) electronic devices. Larger microelectronic-based equipment, and devices that are connected to antennas or to the power grid at the time of the pulse, would be especially vulnerable. Deliberate regional attacks, using lower altitude nuclear detonations, are also possible.

-- - - - - - - - -

BTW: There are numerous scientific articles similar to this out there. It's nothing new. This info has been known for a long time. But YOU just found out about it. So congratulations on your willingness to learn.
#14792355
MB. wrote:So you don't know the answer to my question, is what you're saying here? Are you sure your research on this is as thorough as you believe?


It figures...there is no possible way you even read the article that quickly. So what good would it do to copy and paste a hundred more, you won't read those either.

But if it was about your darling cause "global warming" you would have read and memorized that one, right? LOL

Those in charge of the Manhattan Project weren't 100% sure exactly how big their first nuclear test blast was going to be, however they knew it would be big. Scientists even decades ago knew then and they know now the devastating effects of an EMP. The actual damage won't fully be known unless it happens, however we all know it would be big. So whatever point you are now attempting to make is certifiably silly.
#14792357
You have cited only one source in this thread (actaully, technically, I had to do this for you). That source is here.

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473 ... on-7MB.pdf

The second source you linked (http://www.futurescience.com/emp.html) is based on the findings of the same commission report linked above.

If you had even read your own source you would know the answer to my question. Nice global warming strawman.
#14792360
MB. wrote:You have cited only one source in this thread. That source is here.

http://www.empcommission.org/docs/A2473 ... on-7MB.pdf

The second source you linked (http://www.futurescience.com/emp.html) is based on the findings of the same commission report linked above.

If you had even read your own source you would know the answer to my question. Nice global warming strawman.


Okay you win. I will admit that it's possible if there was an EMP attack, that a hermit who chose to live his life deep in the Pacific Northwest, by himself in a remote cave, his battery powered shaver might still work. You might ask why would this man need a shaver? Well he's a hermit, but he still wishes to maintain a well groomed look in front of his animal friends in the forest.
#14792363
Anyway, my question is, assuming the DPRK developed the capability to conduct such an attack (even assuming the US had not taken the proper precautions) what motivation could the DPRK have for doing so? They would be totally destroyed by US retaliation. I think the critical part of the argument there is missing.

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