Meanwhile .. back in the Good 'ol NK ....
Thread Starter
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Perth - Western Australia
Age: 70
Posts: 1,804
It seems that there is a video circulating depicting the bombing of a US aircraft and destruction of an aircraft carrier.
I also recall the surprise attack didn't bring about the required result, and it all ended very unhappily, and at enormous financial, life, and infrastructure cost, for that nation.
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: Hadlow
Age: 55
Posts: 556
Join Date: Aug 2009
Location: Texas
Age: 59
Posts: 5,173
From the linked BBC article ...
The UN ban remains toothless. Were the significant member of the Security Council, China, to take a more active interest I suggest that the UN ban might begin to matter. We'll see how that works out in the coming months, but I won't be holding my breath.
North Korea is banned from any missile or nuclear tests by the United Nations.
However, it has conducted such tests with increasing frequency and experts say this could lead to advances in its missile technology.
Earlier this month, the North fired four missiles that flew about 1,000km (620 miles), landing in Japanese waters.
However, it has conducted such tests with increasing frequency and experts say this could lead to advances in its missile technology.
Earlier this month, the North fired four missiles that flew about 1,000km (620 miles), landing in Japanese waters.
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Vendee
Posts: 137
It seems as if Senator McCain has hit the rotund one where it hurts...in a crack about weight.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/320347...crazy-fat-kid/
Granted I do not look to the Sun for much, but they often do employ a certain panache with a turn of the phrase.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/320347...crazy-fat-kid/
Granted I do not look to the Sun for much, but they often do employ a certain panache with a turn of the phrase.
Thread Starter
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Perth - Western Australia
Age: 70
Posts: 1,804
The Sun follows the regular media line of dodgy information, coupled with incorrectly-labelled photos, plus a lot of guesswork, when it comes to accuracy in the news.
For crying out loud, the Little Fat Wun is inspecting a drum being filled with lubricating grease, in the newly opened NK, Chongi Lubricant factory - in Aug 2014!
NBC News.com - Kim-Jong-Un amused at lubricant in North Korea factory
Originally Posted by The Sun
Kim Jong-un having the time of his life during one of many official inspections of food factories
NBC News.com - Kim-Jong-Un amused at lubricant in North Korea factory
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Vendee
Posts: 137
True Onetrack. I was not endorsing the Sun but rather commenting more on the headline that they had written for it.
For a more serious delve into how we know some things about NK, I pulled this discussion from the SlateStarCodex. Open Thread 72.25 | Slate Star Codex Unfortunately they is not a Permalink to this.
Chap by the name of John Schilling. Sounds as if he is working for a think-tank in the U.S.
John Schilling says:
March 29, 2017 at 9:47 pm ~new~
We’ve talked about North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the missiles they have to carry them. Before we move on to the final act, which is to say what they plan to do with all of those wonderful toys, there’s an obvious question that some of you might be asking: Just how do we know so much about the strategic weapons of one of the most secretive and isolated regimes on the planet? It’s not like they are going to just tell us about them, right?
And actually, they sort of do. As no less an authority than Dr. Strangelove pointed out, the whole point of a deterrent weapon is lost if you keep it a secret. The North Koreans go out of their way to tell us, show us, and demonstrate for us their missiles and even occasionally their nuclear warheads. And they usually aren’t lying. They aren’t being entirely honest about it either, exaggerating some parts and concealing others. So we’re not going to take their word for it. But their parades and photo ops and public demonstrations are often a good starting point.
Other good starting points: seismic data from nuclear tests. There’s a pretty unambiguous seismic signature from an underground nuclear test, giving us the time and location and approximate yield. It is in theory possible to spoof by setting off a nuclear device in a very large artificial cavern, but we keep a close enough watch on their usual test sites to be confident they aren’t doing that sort of excavation. There’s a network of seismometers being monitored 24/7 for this sort of thing. And while it’s theoretically possible to detect missile launches from seismic data (the reverberation from rocket exhaust hitting the pad can be detected across a few hundred kilometers), that’s a much trickier signature to interpret. So we typically just let the US or South Korean military tell us when the North launches a missile. Their satellites and radar will detect the launch in minutes, they will send out a warning to their own key people almost as fast, and then follow up with a press release in a few hours because if they don’t it will leak out anyway. North Korea’s press releases usually take longer.
Whatever the initial source, once the news breaks we have to figure out what happened and integrate that knowledge into our broader understanding. Melissa Hanham of the Middlebury Institute (Monterey, CA), offers one account of how this proceeds. I particularly like her comment about tweets travelling faster than seismic waves; it does convey the almost literal wave front of tweets, texts, and emails that brings the news to the geographically-dispersed community of wonks that deals with this sort of thing. I’ve worked with the Monterey team in the past, but am more closely associated with the 38 North project run by Johns Hopkins University. It’s a friendly and cooperative rivalry.
If we do start with North Korean propaganda, the next step is to look for what they are hiding. As Melissa notes in her account, the Monterey team has the tools and technical expertise to detect most any sort of image manipulation, and while it is rare for North Korea to fake photos of things that don’t exist they quite frequently edit them to hide things that do – e.g. cutting away from one missile just as it begins to explode, and going to a long shot of a different missile ascending majestically into the heavens. Monterey is equally skilled at geolocation; if an interesting picture comes to their attention, in an hour or two there will be a tweet saying when and where it was taken and what other interesting stuff happened there.
We’d rather have our own pictures, and for that we have satellites. Google Earth doesn’t have the resolution or the refresh rate we really need; fortunately the 38 North team has ties to Digital Globe which can provide 30cm imagery on a daily basis if we tell them what we need. If what we need are pictures of an event that happened yesterday afternoon, probably the best we can do are before-and-after shots, but even those are helpful. And for some propaganda events, e.g. parades, there will be foreign journalists present – usually Chinese, but some of them will share their own unedited photos if we agree not to publish them,
Pictures can tell us the size and shape of e.g. a missile’s exterior, and sometimes telling details like the location of propellant fill/drain ports or extra riveting for structural reinforcement. We want to know what’s on the inside, and more importantly how it will perform.
If there’s an actual flight test, performance can be straightforward – radar tracking will give us the range and apogee, or for a satellite launch the orbital parameters and usually the first-stage impact point. We’d like more detailed trajectory data, like the acceleration profile, but the people with the tracking radars only rarely release that level of detail. For ground tests, we can sometimes read bits of telemetry data off the screens Kim Jong-Un insists on posing in front of, but mostly we are limited to studying rocket plumes. Plume size can give approximate thrust, color and intensity the propellants used, and detailed geometry can give hints to e.g. operating cycles (is there a separate turbopump exhaust?) or control mechanisms (separate verniers, or jet vanes?).
For internal arrangement, it helps that so many of North Korea’s missiles are based on old Soviet technology, because the Russians have published a fair amount of detail on their older models and we can sometimes talk to Russian academics with inside knowledge from the old days. Now that the North Koreans are designing their own engines and other systems, that’s going to be a bit harder – but in partial compensation, they are now showing us pictures of their engine ground tests. So we can maintain a sort of shopping list of e.g. rocket engines available to North Korea, and see which of them are a good match for any new missile we might see.
Also particularly helpful, in 2012 they finally managed to launch a satellite successfully, and the first stage of the launch vehicle necessarily landed far enough from home that South Korea, with a proper oceangoing navy, was able to recover it before their Northern cousins. That was a space launch vehicle, not a missile, but there are clear indications that they are using some of the same technology. So that gives us a pretty good idea of the North Korean state of the art in missile structures and systems in 2012. In their next satellite launch, the first stage disintegrated into several hundred radar-trackable bits just after separation. This probably wasn’t an accident.
Finally, we look for anyone else who might have insight or information we lack. As I mentioned, there’s a friendly rivalry between several teams in this field, and we all talk. Beyond that, the most obvious sources are the national intelligence services of nations with a particular interest in North Korea, namely the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China. They are doing basically the same things we are and with about the same tools, but some unique edges. The United States Government has better satellites than Digital Globe. South Korea and Japan have radar sites positioned to track North Korean launches, and the South Koreans have a bunch of North Korean defectors they can talk to (alas not usually technical specialists). They all typically issue terse press releases with whatever they publicly want people to know, and we arrange occasional closed-door meetings to give them an opportunity for greater candor. But these are all basically spies, and so not to be entirely trusted. They rarely outright lie, but every truth is carefully selected to serve an agenda, and if we can’t verify it directly we at least want to see different governments with different agendas saying the same thing.
Other knowledgeable sources include the Iranians and Pakistanis, who have purchased missile technology from North Korea and in Pakistan’s case sold them nuclear technology in return. These aren’t exactly open and transparent governments, but they have different ideas about what needs to be kept secret and what they ought to brag about. There’s also the important resource that is random nerds on the internet. When North Korea first paraded their mobile ICBM, most of us focused on the missile. Within a day, a bunch of heavy-equipment otaku identified the exact make and model of the transporter chassis; a Chinese product that the Chinese government promptly threw down the memory hole because they hadn’t meant it to be seen carrying North Korean missiles. Nice try – scrub it from the internet, bar the gates of the Great Firewall of China, I’ve already got a copy of the advertising brochure complete with a dimensioned three-view drawing.
For nuclear warheads there’s usually less visible evidence, as the tests are conducted underground. But the seismic signatures of those tests can be precisely measured, and their implications are well understood. We also have satellite imagery of their reactors, whose waste heat really can’t be hidden, though the uranium enrichment centrifuges unfortunately can be. To bridge the gap between the fissile materials we infer them to be producing and the earth-shattering kabooms we hear them produce, we make comparisons to the extensively documented history of the early US nuclear weapons program. Also the programs of nations like Sweden, South Africa, and Iraq – less well documented, but more on point for what an emerging nuclear power in an established nuclear age might do.
But all of these sources combined only add up to fragmentary pieces of a puzzle we have to assemble. For the rest, there’s engineering judgement, analysis, and the presumption of competence. The people who have demonstrated the ability to launch satellites into orbit, we assume will design their other rockets in a manner that at least plausibly could work. The regime that has survived three generations with most of the world turned against it, we assume will adopt military strategies that plausibly could defend that regime against its enemies rather than assure its destruction.
So, given the fragments of hard data, we make educated guesses as to what might make up the rest, apply various modeling tools (and I’ve written a couple of custom codes to handle the missile side) to estimate the performance of the postulated system, and see if the result makes any sense from the North Korean standpoint. Given the number of missing pieces of the puzzle, the problem isn’t finding an answer that makes sense, it’s narrowing it down to one. And establishing confidence bounds, given that some of those puzzle pieces come from very sketchy sources. My initial assessment of the KN-08 ICBM listed six possible configurations plus “maybe it’s just a hoax”, and it took another three years (and four more North Korean photo ops) to get to a single reasonably firm conclusion.
That’s for assessing the technology, where at least there are specific, knowable answers to questions of the form, “If I put together a missile thusly, will it work and how far will it deliver a payload”? Things are a bit fuzzier when the question is, “What is Kim Jong Un going to do with all those missiles, and what can we do about it”? But we haven’t been ignoring those questions, and I’ll deal with them in my (probably) final segment next time.
For a more serious delve into how we know some things about NK, I pulled this discussion from the SlateStarCodex. Open Thread 72.25 | Slate Star Codex Unfortunately they is not a Permalink to this.
Chap by the name of John Schilling. Sounds as if he is working for a think-tank in the U.S.
John Schilling says:
March 29, 2017 at 9:47 pm ~new~
We’ve talked about North Korea’s nuclear weapons, and the missiles they have to carry them. Before we move on to the final act, which is to say what they plan to do with all of those wonderful toys, there’s an obvious question that some of you might be asking: Just how do we know so much about the strategic weapons of one of the most secretive and isolated regimes on the planet? It’s not like they are going to just tell us about them, right?
And actually, they sort of do. As no less an authority than Dr. Strangelove pointed out, the whole point of a deterrent weapon is lost if you keep it a secret. The North Koreans go out of their way to tell us, show us, and demonstrate for us their missiles and even occasionally their nuclear warheads. And they usually aren’t lying. They aren’t being entirely honest about it either, exaggerating some parts and concealing others. So we’re not going to take their word for it. But their parades and photo ops and public demonstrations are often a good starting point.
Other good starting points: seismic data from nuclear tests. There’s a pretty unambiguous seismic signature from an underground nuclear test, giving us the time and location and approximate yield. It is in theory possible to spoof by setting off a nuclear device in a very large artificial cavern, but we keep a close enough watch on their usual test sites to be confident they aren’t doing that sort of excavation. There’s a network of seismometers being monitored 24/7 for this sort of thing. And while it’s theoretically possible to detect missile launches from seismic data (the reverberation from rocket exhaust hitting the pad can be detected across a few hundred kilometers), that’s a much trickier signature to interpret. So we typically just let the US or South Korean military tell us when the North launches a missile. Their satellites and radar will detect the launch in minutes, they will send out a warning to their own key people almost as fast, and then follow up with a press release in a few hours because if they don’t it will leak out anyway. North Korea’s press releases usually take longer.
Whatever the initial source, once the news breaks we have to figure out what happened and integrate that knowledge into our broader understanding. Melissa Hanham of the Middlebury Institute (Monterey, CA), offers one account of how this proceeds. I particularly like her comment about tweets travelling faster than seismic waves; it does convey the almost literal wave front of tweets, texts, and emails that brings the news to the geographically-dispersed community of wonks that deals with this sort of thing. I’ve worked with the Monterey team in the past, but am more closely associated with the 38 North project run by Johns Hopkins University. It’s a friendly and cooperative rivalry.
If we do start with North Korean propaganda, the next step is to look for what they are hiding. As Melissa notes in her account, the Monterey team has the tools and technical expertise to detect most any sort of image manipulation, and while it is rare for North Korea to fake photos of things that don’t exist they quite frequently edit them to hide things that do – e.g. cutting away from one missile just as it begins to explode, and going to a long shot of a different missile ascending majestically into the heavens. Monterey is equally skilled at geolocation; if an interesting picture comes to their attention, in an hour or two there will be a tweet saying when and where it was taken and what other interesting stuff happened there.
We’d rather have our own pictures, and for that we have satellites. Google Earth doesn’t have the resolution or the refresh rate we really need; fortunately the 38 North team has ties to Digital Globe which can provide 30cm imagery on a daily basis if we tell them what we need. If what we need are pictures of an event that happened yesterday afternoon, probably the best we can do are before-and-after shots, but even those are helpful. And for some propaganda events, e.g. parades, there will be foreign journalists present – usually Chinese, but some of them will share their own unedited photos if we agree not to publish them,
Pictures can tell us the size and shape of e.g. a missile’s exterior, and sometimes telling details like the location of propellant fill/drain ports or extra riveting for structural reinforcement. We want to know what’s on the inside, and more importantly how it will perform.
If there’s an actual flight test, performance can be straightforward – radar tracking will give us the range and apogee, or for a satellite launch the orbital parameters and usually the first-stage impact point. We’d like more detailed trajectory data, like the acceleration profile, but the people with the tracking radars only rarely release that level of detail. For ground tests, we can sometimes read bits of telemetry data off the screens Kim Jong-Un insists on posing in front of, but mostly we are limited to studying rocket plumes. Plume size can give approximate thrust, color and intensity the propellants used, and detailed geometry can give hints to e.g. operating cycles (is there a separate turbopump exhaust?) or control mechanisms (separate verniers, or jet vanes?).
For internal arrangement, it helps that so many of North Korea’s missiles are based on old Soviet technology, because the Russians have published a fair amount of detail on their older models and we can sometimes talk to Russian academics with inside knowledge from the old days. Now that the North Koreans are designing their own engines and other systems, that’s going to be a bit harder – but in partial compensation, they are now showing us pictures of their engine ground tests. So we can maintain a sort of shopping list of e.g. rocket engines available to North Korea, and see which of them are a good match for any new missile we might see.
Also particularly helpful, in 2012 they finally managed to launch a satellite successfully, and the first stage of the launch vehicle necessarily landed far enough from home that South Korea, with a proper oceangoing navy, was able to recover it before their Northern cousins. That was a space launch vehicle, not a missile, but there are clear indications that they are using some of the same technology. So that gives us a pretty good idea of the North Korean state of the art in missile structures and systems in 2012. In their next satellite launch, the first stage disintegrated into several hundred radar-trackable bits just after separation. This probably wasn’t an accident.
Finally, we look for anyone else who might have insight or information we lack. As I mentioned, there’s a friendly rivalry between several teams in this field, and we all talk. Beyond that, the most obvious sources are the national intelligence services of nations with a particular interest in North Korea, namely the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China. They are doing basically the same things we are and with about the same tools, but some unique edges. The United States Government has better satellites than Digital Globe. South Korea and Japan have radar sites positioned to track North Korean launches, and the South Koreans have a bunch of North Korean defectors they can talk to (alas not usually technical specialists). They all typically issue terse press releases with whatever they publicly want people to know, and we arrange occasional closed-door meetings to give them an opportunity for greater candor. But these are all basically spies, and so not to be entirely trusted. They rarely outright lie, but every truth is carefully selected to serve an agenda, and if we can’t verify it directly we at least want to see different governments with different agendas saying the same thing.
Other knowledgeable sources include the Iranians and Pakistanis, who have purchased missile technology from North Korea and in Pakistan’s case sold them nuclear technology in return. These aren’t exactly open and transparent governments, but they have different ideas about what needs to be kept secret and what they ought to brag about. There’s also the important resource that is random nerds on the internet. When North Korea first paraded their mobile ICBM, most of us focused on the missile. Within a day, a bunch of heavy-equipment otaku identified the exact make and model of the transporter chassis; a Chinese product that the Chinese government promptly threw down the memory hole because they hadn’t meant it to be seen carrying North Korean missiles. Nice try – scrub it from the internet, bar the gates of the Great Firewall of China, I’ve already got a copy of the advertising brochure complete with a dimensioned three-view drawing.
For nuclear warheads there’s usually less visible evidence, as the tests are conducted underground. But the seismic signatures of those tests can be precisely measured, and their implications are well understood. We also have satellite imagery of their reactors, whose waste heat really can’t be hidden, though the uranium enrichment centrifuges unfortunately can be. To bridge the gap between the fissile materials we infer them to be producing and the earth-shattering kabooms we hear them produce, we make comparisons to the extensively documented history of the early US nuclear weapons program. Also the programs of nations like Sweden, South Africa, and Iraq – less well documented, but more on point for what an emerging nuclear power in an established nuclear age might do.
But all of these sources combined only add up to fragmentary pieces of a puzzle we have to assemble. For the rest, there’s engineering judgement, analysis, and the presumption of competence. The people who have demonstrated the ability to launch satellites into orbit, we assume will design their other rockets in a manner that at least plausibly could work. The regime that has survived three generations with most of the world turned against it, we assume will adopt military strategies that plausibly could defend that regime against its enemies rather than assure its destruction.
So, given the fragments of hard data, we make educated guesses as to what might make up the rest, apply various modeling tools (and I’ve written a couple of custom codes to handle the missile side) to estimate the performance of the postulated system, and see if the result makes any sense from the North Korean standpoint. Given the number of missing pieces of the puzzle, the problem isn’t finding an answer that makes sense, it’s narrowing it down to one. And establishing confidence bounds, given that some of those puzzle pieces come from very sketchy sources. My initial assessment of the KN-08 ICBM listed six possible configurations plus “maybe it’s just a hoax”, and it took another three years (and four more North Korean photo ops) to get to a single reasonably firm conclusion.
That’s for assessing the technology, where at least there are specific, knowable answers to questions of the form, “If I put together a missile thusly, will it work and how far will it deliver a payload”? Things are a bit fuzzier when the question is, “What is Kim Jong Un going to do with all those missiles, and what can we do about it”? But we haven’t been ignoring those questions, and I’ll deal with them in my (probably) final segment next time.
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Germany
Age: 71
Posts: 1,553
THAT John Schilling!
John Schilling writes for the blog 38 North: https://www.google.de/search?q=john+...ing+38+north&*
He seems to know a lot about North Korea, more even than John Hill.
He seems to know a lot about North Korea, more even than John Hill.
Join Date: Nov 2011
Location: Japan
Posts: 512
Malaysia have under pressure finally agreed to 'return' the body of Kim Jong Nam to DPRK, in exchange for their citizens still held there.
It seems that they have taken the wise precaution of cremating it first.
Kim Jong-nam to be cremated, sent to NK: reports
It seems that they have taken the wise precaution of cremating it first.
Kim Jong-nam to be cremated, sent to NK: reports
Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: Vendee
Posts: 137
Originally Posted by chuks
John Schilling writes for the blog 38 North: https://www.google.de/search?q=john+...ing+38+north&*
He seems to know a lot about North Korea, more even than John Hill.
He seems to know a lot about North Korea, more even than John Hill.
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Where the Quaboag River flows, USA
Age: 66
Posts: 3,330
Then there's 90% kill rate with NK nukes.
How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans | TheHill
GF
How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans | TheHill
GF
Join Date: Nov 2013
Location: apogee
Age: 64
Posts: 57
Doubt it will come to that. The US will tolerate only so much. If NK ever gets far from close to the above mentioned capability they will be stubbed out by preventative measures from the US unless big brother China finally gets its act together and shuts down that little cancer on world society.
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Currently within the EU
Posts: 310
Originally Posted by galaxy flyer
Then there's 90% kill rate with NK nukes.
How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans | TheHill
GF
How North Korea could kill 90 percent of Americans | TheHill
GF
Just a standard container sent through a reputable shipping company would do the job.
And after the first one is 'delivered' it will bring world trade to a halt.
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: UK
Posts: 4,446
During the Cold War there were continuous scenarios about nuclear weapons being brought into countries via 'diplomatic suitcases'. That didn't come to anything; there isn't any reason why this theory should either.
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Currently within the EU
Posts: 310
Originally Posted by Fareastdriver
During the Cold War there were continuous scenarios about nuclear weapons being brought into countries via 'diplomatic suitcases'. That didn't come to anything; there isn't any reason why this theory should either.
That doesn't apply to N.K.
Once the ruling clique knows that the game is finally up they will have no incentive to hold back and every incentive to get in their revenge.
Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: Currently within the EU
Posts: 310
Originally Posted by Fareastdriver
Even Asian ruling cliques have a desire to keep on living.
