North Korea issues new threat to U.S. bases (1 Viewer)

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Does anyone else see the humor in this guy,? he reminds me of a cranky child trying to get his way....


(CNN) -- North Korea on Tuesday served up its latest round of threats against the United States, saying it plans to place military units tasked with targeting U.S. bases under combat ready status.

The Supreme Command of the North Korean military said it "will put on the highest alert all the field artillery units including strategic rocket units and long-range artillery units, which are assigned to strike bases of the U.S. imperialist aggressor troops in the U.S. mainland and on Hawaii and Guam and other operational zone in the Pacific, as well as all the enemy targets in South Korea and its vicinity."

Angered by tougher U.N. sanctions and joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea, Pyongyang has issued a range of bombastic threats in recent weeks.

North Korea's threats: 5 things to know

The announcement this month by the United States that its B-52 bombers were making flights over South Korea as part of the military exercises particularly enraged the North, which warned of reprisals if the sorties continued.
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The North Korean military statement Tuesday, carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, referred to the B-52 flights again, saying they had taken place over South Korea on Monday.

The U.S. Department of Defense responded to the North's latest saber-rattling by reiterating its confidence that it can fend off whatever the regime of Kim Jong Un can come up with.

"The U.S. is fully capable of defending ourselves and our allies against an attack" by North Korea, said Lt. Jack Miller, a Pentagon spokesman.

"We are firmly committed to defending the Republic of Korea and Japan," he added, using the official name for South Korea.

U.S. and South Korean generals on Friday signed a new contingency plan "designed to counter future North Korean provocations."

Military officials from the two allies developed the plan after North Korea shelled South Korea's Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, killing four people.

Weeks of saber-rattling

The slew of fiery rhetoric from Pyongyang in the past few weeks has included threats of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the United States and South Korea, as well as the declaration that the armistice that stopped the Korean War in 1953 is no longer valid.

Most observers say North Korea is still years away from having the technology to deliver a nuclear warhead on a missile, but it does have has plenty of conventional military firepower, including medium-range ballistic missiles that can carry high explosives for hundreds of miles.

The heightened tensions on the Korean Peninsula came after the North carried out a long-range rocket launch in December and an underground nuclear test last month, prompting the U.N. Security Council to step up sanctions on the secretive regime.

The North Korean statement Tuesday also referred to the sinking of a South Korean warship, the Cheonan, which took place three years ago to the day, killing 46 sailors.

South Korea blamed the North for the attack, accusations that Pyongyang has repeatedly denied.

"The present South Korean puppet authorities tried to link the Cheonan sinking case with the DPRK and shift the blame for the Yeonpyeong Island shelling on to the DPRK," the statement said, using the shortened version of the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

vid here.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/26/world/asia/north-korea-us-threats/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

 

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North Korea's threats: Five things to know

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/world/asia/north-korea-five-things/index.html
Video propaganda showing the White House and Congress being blown up. Talk of hitting U.S. bases in the Pacific. The renunciation of a 60-year-old armistice that has kept the tenuous peace on the Korean Peninsula.

It seems barely a day passes without another North Korean threat, and coming after the December launch of a long-range rocket and a third nuclear test in February, the florid declarations from Pyongyang have gotten the attention of the United States and its allies.

More: North Korea touts its human rights credentials

So why now, and how nervous should you be? Here are five things to consider.

It's an inside game ...
Numerous analysts on both sides of the Pacific attribute the aggressive posture is part of an attempt by North Korea's young leader Kim Jong Un to consolidate his power in the reclusive communist state founded by his grandfather.


"First and foremost, it's for his domestic audience," said Jasper Kim, founder of the Asia-Pacific Global Research Group in Seoul, South Korea. "Because without the support of the military, he won't be around for much longer. And so he has to bolster his support with the brass."

That's a tough sell for North Korea, "where age matters," he added. Kim is believed to be 29.

More: Kim Jong Un's life

Peter Hayes, director of the San Francisco-based Nautilus Institute, says there's also a debate going on inside the North Korean leadership about the country's future as a nuclear state.

One side wants "to be a nuclear-armed state that is able to behave like the recognized, legal nuclear weapons states and play their game and turn the tables on them," Hayes said.

"That is, in my view, what is going on in the test and the rocket firing," he said. "The other policy current is associated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the international faction of the Korean Worker's Party, which is to negotiate our way out of this mess."

A recent statement from the foreign ministry declared that North Korea would not give up its nuclear "sacred sword" as long as the United States remains hostile -- a conditional statement that signals Pyongyang may be willing to give up the bomb under the right circumstances, Hayes said.

... But the talk is bigger this time

"They say a lot of these kind of things, so there's a tendency to treat it as the kind of stream of crazy you get from North Korea," said Jeffrey Lewis, East Asia director at the California-based James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "But this is not normal. It is more vitriolic."

A recent statement by a top North Korean general specifically talked of hitting Washington with a nuclear weapon in the event of war. "That's a pretty direct threat," Lewis said.

More: Timeline of North Korea's threats

The North Korean rhetoric ramped up after the February 12 nuclear test and the U.N. sanctions that followed. Meanwhile, Victor Cha, director of Asian Studies at Georgetown University and former director for Asian affairs at the National Security Council, told CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" that North Korea has carried out some sort of military provocation within 14 weeks of every South Korean presidential inauguration since 1992. South Korean President Park Geun-hye took office on February 25, "so start the clock," he said.

"What is not normal is that the backdrop for this is about a year of very unpredictable behavior by a new leadership, and a sequence of provocations that is more concentrated over a period of time than we have seen in the last 20 years," he said. "So in that context, although to the average listener these threats may seem like it's just the North Koreans firing their mouths off again, for those of us that look at this more closely this is a little bit different -- and more concerning."

Their nukes aren't useful ... yet

Most observers say Pyongyang is still years away from having the technology to deliver a nuclear warhead on a missile. While its scientists managed to lob a small satellite into space in December, putting a working device atop a missile, launching it and hitting a target with it is vastly more complicated, Hayes said.

More: Nuclear weapons: Who has what

But Lewis, who also runs the Arms Control Wonk blog, said the North Koreans may have tried to "skip a step" with its early bomb tests and build one small enough to fit on a missile. That might explain why its first two were relatively unsuccessful.

"I think it's plausible to think that they have a warhead design in which they are confident that's under 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) -- still not as small as you need to put on a missile and launch it to the U.S., but closer than they were a couple of years ago," he said.

And while Washington hasn't come out and said it, Lewis said the March 15 announcement that the Pentagon will deploy additional ground-based missile interceptors on the West Coast may signal that the North Koreans have deployed a long-range missile they put on display at a parade in 2012. Lewis said the announcement was "mostly for show," but could reflect real U.S. concerns about those missiles.

"If you're going to spend $1 billion to deploy interceptors, they ought to come right out and say it," he said.



North Korea also has plenty of conventional military firepower, including medium-range ballistic missiles that can carry high explosives for hundreds of miles, as well as thousands of cannons, rocket launchers and tanks massed across the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South. Seoul is within range of many of those weapons, and the North has threatened before to turn the southern capital into a "sea of fire."

A North Korean bombardment could kill tens of thousands of people in Seoul before South Korean and U.S. retaliation could smash those guns, Hayes said. But that would essentially launch a new Korean War -- one he said would end badly for the long-impoverished North.

"They have less than 30 days of fuel and no ability to refuel," he said. "They've got to fight a very short war before they're just walking to where they're going to fight."

Pyongyang keeps its forces massed on the DMZ "precisely because they're weak," he said.

There are other avenues. When computers at South Korean banks and broadcasters began to crash on Wednesday, suspicion initially fell on the North. South Korea has accused the North of similar hacking attacks before, including incidents in 2010 and 2012 that also targeted banks and media organizations. Adam Segal, a cybersecurity expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, said the hacking is consistent with previous North Korean actions.

So now what?

For years, Pyongyang has made deals to curtail its nuclear and missile work in exchange for economic aid. Those deals have fallen apart when the North went on to conduct other tests. The six-party talks among the North, its Asian neighbors and the United States fizzled in 2007, and the North's first attempt at a satellite launch scotched a previous U.S. plan to trade hundreds of thousands of tons of food for a halt to weapons work.

"I think the problem right now is that you cannot engage them directly after they have done a series of ballistic missile and nuclear tests, and we are going into a period of sanctions now through the U.N. Security Council resolution," Cha said.

"They don't want to give up their nuclear weapons. They want to be able to have their cake and eat it, too. And U.S. policy for the past quarter-century has been these things are all on the table if you are willing to give up your nuclear weapons," he said. "And so this is the problem. This is the dilemma right now."

Meanwhile, the United States is going ahead with joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises amid the North Korean threats, adding a special little twist -- overflights by massive B-52 bombers. It's a move reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War, and one Hayes called "tactically smart but strategically stupid."

"The North Koreans will have noted it for what it is -- an affirmation of the fact that we're playing the nuclear game with North Korea, and that's the last thing we want to do," he said. "I think our posture is either to persuade ourselves that we're hanging tough, which is a domestic game in Washington, or to reassure our allies and dissuade South Korea from going it alone with nuclear weapons."

But both Hayes and Lewis said there's little to lose by continuing to engage the North.

"We do what we can on defense, and if the North Koreans want to bargain or haggle, I'm prepared to do that," Lewis said.

 

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Hey if Dennis Rodman likes him he's A-ok in my book as well

 

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INTERESTING PICTURES
n.k. looks nothing like it use to much more western than it was
check it out here
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/25/travel/north-korea-travel-gallery/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

and i still don't know why were isolating them we should be opening them up by blasting free wifi to the people and t.v sig's once opened up the people would not allow a return of the old.. they want we give em and prevent the goverment from access and allow the poeple to see what everyone has and whats up with the world it would be next to imposs for them to go back to isolation this would dislodge un from power eventually .... they already have moved toward western ways in some respect ie: resturants pizza ect. new color in the cities, nice new buildings... so why isolate ? its a stupid move that will allow un to keep control of everything and stay in power ....