All Things North Korea Thread

[visionary]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/6a13a68ca465433ab757b3717b86c935/seoul-says-nkorea-has-fired-ballistic-missile-sea

Seoul says NKorea has fired a ballistic missile into the sea

 

North Korea fired a ballistic missile into the sea on Wednesday, South Korea's military said, the fourth reported weapons launch the North has carried out in about two weeks.

 

The missile fired from the North's western Hwanghae province flew toward the water off the country's east coast, the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement.

 

South Korean military officials were analyzing what type of missile it was and how far it flew, according to Seoul's Defense Ministry.

 

North Korea routinely conducts missile and other weapons tests, but the latest launch came after North Korea warned of unspecified "physical counter-actions" against a U.S. plan to deploy an advanced missile defense system in South Korea by the end of next year.

 

Seoul and Washington officials said they need the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, system to better cope with what they call North Korea's increasing military threats. North Korea called the system a provocation that it says is only aimed at bolstering U.S. military hegemony in the region.

North Korea is pushing to manufacture a warhead small enough to be placed on a long-range missile that can reach the continental U.S., but South Korean defense officials say the North doesn't yet have such a miniaturized warhead. Some civilian experts, however, believe the North has the technology to put warheads on shorter-range missiles that can strike South Korea and Japan.

 

https://twitter.com/AFP/status/760652714166525953?lang=en

BREAKING US prepared to 'defend ourselves, allies' following North Korea missile test: State Dept
9:45 PM

Edited August 3, 2016 by visionary

[visionary]

 

[tshile]

Yahoo Finance - 'Manbang' is North Korea's Netflix

 

Quote

North Korea announced last week that it’s launching Manbang (“Mon-bahng”), what it’s calling a “Netflix style video-on-demand.” Manbang literally translates to “everywhere” in Korean, and North Korea hopes the device will be ubiquitous.

 

[China]

N. Korea launches ballistic missile from submarine amid US-Seoul drills

A North Korean submarine has test-launched a ballistic missile in the East China Sea, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported. It comes amid US-Korean military drills that Pyongyang has called a “threat.”

The missile was reportedly launched off the North's eastern coast, according to Yonhap.

The missile traveled several hundred kilometers in the air before falling into the Sea of Japan, Japan's national public broadcaster NHK reported, citing the Japanese military.

The US said that the North Korean missile traveled around 480 kilometers (300 miles), Reuters quoted a US defense official as saying. “This was likely a KN-11 ballistic missile,” the official added, stating that the US had detected and tracked the submarine-launched missile.

Japan reacted to the North Korean missile launch with a protest, saying the missile posed a “threat” to its security.

“This poses a grave threat to Japan’s security, and is an unforgivable act that damages regional peace and stability markedly,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the media.

Click on the link for the full article

[zoony]

Wow, those sanctions are really working.  Their economy is so crippled that they have the bomb, ballistic missiles, and submarine launch capabilities.

 

They could basically invade Saudi Arabia and win, a wealthy country with no sanctions.  I think we need to re-think the whole International containment model.  It doesn't work.

 

[Predicto]

They can't invade anyone, not even South Korea.   They couldn't feed their army for more than 3 days.

They could, however, murder millions of innocent civilians before they got their asses kicked.   And that sucks.

[Lombardi's_kid_brother]

I think what North Korea shows is that any country can have an extremely lethal offensive weapons if they are willing to throw their entire GDP at it. (Especially if they have had a senior partner like China for decades).

Numbers on North Korea are all wild guesses, but they are probably spending something in the neighborhood of 30 percent of their GDP on the military. Imagine what Mexico would have if it spend $300 billion on its military.

[TheGreatBuzz]

What do the Chinese get from this relationship other than having someone worse to point at?

[China]

18 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

What do the Chinese get from this relationship other than having someone worse to point at?

 

I don't know if it's true, but I read somewhere that they get a buffer between them and South Korea that prevents their population from defecting to South Korea.

[Larry]

On August 22, 2016 at 2:50 PM, tshile said:

Yahoo Finance - 'Manbang' is North Korea's Netflix

 

Thought I'd read somewhere that there were only 32 IP addresses in North Korea. 

Recall reading an article written by a woman who taught at a special school for the children of NK elites. And she was forbidden from mentioning that the Internet exists. 

38 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

What do the Chinese get from this relationship other than having someone worse to point at?

 

I also think that they get to really tick off the US (and other countries they don't like, like Japan). And it costs them almost nothing. 

[China]

North Korea threatens nuclear strike amid US-South Korea drill

Washington (CNN)The US and South Korean militaries started a massive joint annual exercise Monday, a drill that has drawn North Korean threats of nuclear retaliation.

North Korea will "turn the stronghold of provocation into a heap of ashes through Korean-style pre-emptive nuclear strike" if the US and South Korea "show the slightest sign of aggression" during the drill, a spokesman for North Korea's military was quoted as saying by the country's state media.

 

North Korean forces are "ready to mount a pre-emptive retaliatory strike at all enemy attack groups involved in Ulchi Freedom Guardian," he said, referring to the exercise by its official name.

 

The exercise takes place almost exactly one year after North Korean troops shelled South Korean territory and only days after South Korea welcomed the highest-ranking North Korean official defector in decades.

 

That defection, of Pyongyang's deputy ambassador to the UK, caused North Korea to issue a statement calling the diplomat a criminal, with South Korean officials expressing concerns that North Korea might dispatch assassination squads to eliminate potential defectors abroad.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[TheGreatBuzz]

Can something be both pre-emptive and retaliatory?

[Predicto]

16 hours ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

What do the Chinese get from this relationship other than having someone worse to point at?

 

Not having the US troops currently in South Korea move closer to their border.

More importantly, not having 25 million starving North Korean refugees streaming across into China.  I think China would love to get rid of the Kim crime family and replace it with something more reliable/controllable, but they don't know know to do it without massive disruption and uncertainty.   So they dither.    

[GoSkins0721]

I had a partner at our firm nod off in my meeting last week. My boy Kim knows how to handle this ****:

North Korea publicly executed two top officials earlier this month by shooting them with anti-aircraft guns, a South Korean newspaper reported Tuesday... JoongAng Ilbo reported that Hwang was killed because his policy proposals were seen as a challenge to Kim, while Ri was accused of nodding off during a meeting with the dictator as well as corruption. 

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/08/30/north-korea-reportedly-executes-two-top-officials-with-anti-aircraft-guns.html

[visionary]

 

[TheGoodBits]

Gotta think the situation in NK will reach a breaking point sometime in the next 10 years... Not sure exactly how but Junior's grasp on power seems tenuous at best. 

[zoony]

At some point the senior leaders are going to realize that none of them are safe. That will be the end of the boy wonder

youd think his dad would have made him read Machiavelli a few dozen times. You don't keep executing those close to you

[TheGoodBits]

58 minutes ago, zoony said:

At some point the senior leaders are going to realize that none of them are safe. That will be the end of the boy wonder

youd think his dad would have made him read Machiavelli a few dozen times. You don't keep executing those close to you

Yeah that's kinda what I was thinking. Only been 5 years with him in power, and his style of ruling doesn't seem sustainable.

[visionary]

 

[China]

Just noticed the discordance with the picture that accompanies the execution news.  In the picture they're all laughing it up like the executions are great fun.

[visionary]

 

[China]

South Korea to blare POP MUSIC into North Korea to take down Kim Jong-un

SOUTH Korea is set to blare Western pop music across its border with North Korea as part of its latest attempt to breed discontent in Kim Jong-un’s hermit kingdom.

The bizarre tactic has been proposed in response to yet another nuclear test by the aggressive maverick state, which has put the world on red alert. 

Korea pop music, nicknamed K-Pop, will be played from huge speakers positioned near the border, with officials claiming the catchy tunes will be audible from a distance of 20 miles. 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[China]

North Korea Has Just 28 Websites

There are more than 140 million .com and .net domains on the internet. There’s also millions of websites for each country code top-level domain, or ccTLD, such as .de for Germany, .cn for China and so on.

North Korea, one of the most closed-off countries in the world, is not a huge fan of the internet and the web, and we had no idea how many websites the country had registered for its own top-level domain, .kp—until today.

On Tuesday, apparently by mistake, North Korea misconfigured its nameserver, essentially a list that holds information on all of the domains that exist for .kp, allowing anyone to query it and get the list.

In other words, a snafu by North Korea’s system administrators allowed anyone to ask the country’s nameserver: “can I have all of your information on this domain?" and get an answer, giving everyone a peek into the strange world of North Korea’s web.

“Now we have a complete list of domain names for the country and it's surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) very small,” Matt Bryant, a security engineer who found out about the mistake, told Motherboard in an email.

North Korea has only 28 registered domains, according to the leaked data.

“We didn’t think there was much in the way of internet resources in North Korea, and according to these leaked zone files, we were right,” Doug Madory, a researcher at Dyn, a company that monitors internet use and access around the world, told Motherboard.

Click on the link for the full article

 

[visionary]