"A Naval Blockade Is the Best Option to Cut Off North Korea"

Retired Admiral James Stavrides, A Naval Blockade Is the Best Option to Cut Off North Korea:

The fact is, the only way to keep the Kim regime from violating UN sanctions would be a stringent naval blockade. While a full-on blockade would require a Security Council resolution, it would be possible for the U.S. to immediately start putting in place the rudiments of a comprehensive inspection regime on the high seas, which could be easily adapted over time as more allies, partners and ultimately geopolitical competitors like China and Russia can be persuaded to sign on. Indeed, the Trump administration has already been thinking along these lines.

Such a blockade would serve three key purposes: definitively cutting off North Korea’s access to oil imports from the sea; stopping Korean exports, especially textiles and seafood (which are of significant hard currency value to the regime); and ensuring that high-tech machinery and raw materials that might support Kim’s nuclear-weapons and missile programs are not allowed into the Hermit Kingdom.

While China might continue to provide such supplies across the long Chinese-North Korean land border, a naval blockade would increase pressure on Beijing to comply with existing UN sanctions, as any illegal imports would be obvious proof of Chinese violations.

Setting up a naval blockade is a tactical challenge, even for the U.S. North Korea operates commercial and military ports on its east and west coasts of the peninsula, including Nampo on the Bay of Korea and Hungnam on the Sea of Japan. It also has ports in the far northeast of the country on the edge of Russia, which has been one of Kim’s apologists on the world stage. Shutting down the entire flow of goods into and out of North Korea would significantly tax the U.S. Pacific Fleet.

But it wouldn’t be impossible. . . 

Well, we are technically still at war with the NORKS, so it's not an new act of war.

As the Admrial notes, it would put a real strain on the U.S. fleet,  especially without lots of allied help.

CIA World Factbook (from whence came the image above) notes the following "major" seaports:

Ch'ongjin, Haeju, Hungnam (Hamhung), Namp'o, Senbong, Songnim, Sonbong (formerly Unggi), Wonsan

" Detecting a North Korean Missile Strike on Guam" nice video from the Center for Strategic and International Studies

How It Works: Detecting a North Korean Missile Strike on Guam:

North Korea Says It's Ready for "Any Mode" of War. Really? Let's Crank Up the Bad Weather War Machine

NY Daily News says North Korea claims it’s ‘ready’ for 'war' as U.S. ships approach

North Korea in "darken" stealth mode

A North Korean official on Monday blasted the deployment of a battle-ready U.S. strike group to the waters off the Korean Peninsula — and pledged that the Communist dictatorship is "ready" for war.

The explosive response from Pyongyang comes as tensions on the peninsula are escalating because of intensified cooperation between the U.S. and South Korea. The intensification came to a head when the U.S. Navy's Carl Vinson strike group received orders on Sunday to cancel a planned Australia trip and redirect to Korean waters.

As the strike group approached North Korea late Monday, a spokesman for the isolated country's foreign ministry called the U.S. decision "outrageous" and vowed that it could provoke "catastrophic consequences."

"This goes to prove that the U.S. reckless moves for invading the DPRK have reached a serious phase of its scenario," the spokesman said in a statement, using an acronym for the North's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "If the U.S. dares opt for a military action, crying out for 'preemptive attack' and 'removal of the headquarters,' the DPRK is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S."

I suggest that the NORKS need to pay attention to the oddball theories of the fringe that "knows" the U.S. has the ability to turn weather into a weapon - as in Weather Warfare: Beware the US Military’s Experiments with Climatic Warfare:

Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.

Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’. During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’

Some of you may recall the accusation that Katrina was a Japanese Yakuza plot using Russian tech to attack the U.S. via a hurricane (see here) or something.

NORK Drought

I don't want to tip our hand, but, well, you know giving bad weather to the NORKS would ruin their economy, starve their people . . . of, wait, that's what the 3 Kims have done over the past 70 years ... bad weather has the potential to make it worse, though, so there.

By the way, a lot of the "weather weapon" -uh - nut jobs "concernees" cite a paper from the USAF Air University, Air Command and Staff College in 1996 imagining the world in the future Weather As A Force Multiplier: Owning The Weather In 2025, which reads a lot like science fiction to me, but not so much to others, who see it as proof that we have a secret weather weapon (see here for example).

I say, if we got it, let's use it and see how ready the NORKS are for that "mode" of war.

UPDATE: The famous report that some people seem to think reflects reality:

Weather As A Force Multiplier by lawofsea on Scribd

Fun with North Korea: Again with the "Sea of Fire"

A video put out by the NORKS (uploaded to YouTube by ZeroHedge) "demonstrating" (nice word that, since it attempts to "demonize" the U.S.) how the great forces of the latest Kim-in-Charge will demolish any threat to the Hermit Kingdom and prove the superiority of "juche" over - well, over whatever the U.S. represents to the repressive regime in Pyongyang:



Long term readers may recall that the NORKS have been threatening the world with a "sea of fire". See also here, here, here, and here. Such threats may be annual events, I quit tracking them after a few years.

In any event, the NORK leadership is perpetually ticked off about something (perhaps having to live in North Korea?) and, for the most part, their blustery ways have spooked the better off places in the world into offering food, medicine and the like that prevent the place cratering around the ears of the current Kim. Yes, we prop up this family of nutjobs.

Now, however, the NORKs may have some weapons to threaten the world around them and it seems time to tell the would-be neighborhood mini-bully to grow up. As was touched on during Sunday's Midrats (starting about 52:00), the U.S. and its allies (and the Chinese, neighbors and sometime protectors of the NORKs) need to quit being nice to the current Kim and let him know that his rantings have outrun their usefulness and that, as a rising nuclear power, he is playing with . . . fire when he and his regime make threats.

As my sailors were wont to say, "Paybacks are a ". . ."



Here's hoping that some give Kim a clue that, if he's not in the big leagues, he's nudging up against the self-protection rights of other countries. That has real consequences.

North Korea Threatens Preemptive Suicide If It Doesn't Get Its Way

Well, it's not so much what the headlines say (as in "DPRK warns of preemptive strikes as U.S.-South Korea war games kick off" or "Pyongyang threatens pre-emptive nuclear strike on US-South Korea military drill",) but more what the effect of such strikes would be on the brutal dictatorship of the current Kim-in-Power (KIP).

As the International Business Times reports here:

North Korea has yet again threatened to mount a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the US-South Korea joint military exercise, which is set to kick off on 22 August. Tens of thousands of South Korean and American troops are already in the Korean peninsula to take part in the two-week-long annual drill.

Pyongyang views the military exercise termed Ulchi Freedom Guardian as a rehearsal for an actual attack on the North. It said that a nuclear war may "break out any moment" given the volatility in the Korean peninsula.

"They should properly know that from this moment the first-strike combined units of the KPA keep themselves fully ready to mount a preemptive retaliatory strike at all enemy attack groups involved in Ulchi Freedom Guardian," Pyongyang's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KNCA) said in its latest dispatch.

It added that Washington and Seoul "should bear in mind that if they show the slightest sign of aggression on (DPRK's) inviolable land, seas and air ..., it would turn the stronghold of provocation into a heap of ashes through Korean-style preemptive nuclear strike".

Perhaps Kim is looking for more aid to feed his ever hungry population and is, once again, resorting to nuclear blackmail. Whatever his reasons, he undoubtedly knows any act on his part will spell the doom of both his country and, more to the point, of him and all his minions.

Gotta love KIP in the cockpit trying to pretend like he has any idea of what he's looking at. Sort of an analogy . . .

North Koreans Pointlessly Launch a Missile from a Submerged Ship

Much to the relief of the captain and crew of a North Korean submarine, "North Korea Test-Fires a Submarine-Launched Ballistic Missile". The NORK submarine which appears have a single missile tube didn't sink during the evolution which makes if a "win, win" for the crew as the latest Kim-in-Charge was observing the process and leading cheers or something.

North Korea just staged a second test of its submarine-launched ballistic missile. According to North Korean state media, the April 23 test was observed by ruler Kim Jong-un himself. The launch was conducted from North Korea's only ballistic missile submarine, Gorae ("Whale"), while submerged off the country's east coast. The underwater launch itself appears to have been a success, but the missile crashed shortly afterward into the Sea of Japan.

The missile, known as Pukkuksong-1 ("Polar Star"), is based on the obsolete Cold War-era R-27 ballistic missile. Kim Jong-un says the test means North Korea is "now capable of hitting the heads of the south (sic) Korean puppet forces and the US imperialists anytime as it pleases."

Huh.

So here's a open letter to the Loathsome One:

Dear Current Kim-in-Charge:
For the last 66 years or so, the "US imperialists" could, at anytime as it pleases them, hit you and yours in the in the head, to borrow your phrase.

The fact that they haven't shows a great deal of patience on their part, especially in light of the provocations you continue to provide.

In fact, I'm pretty sure those "Korean puppet forces" also have forgone many opportunities to turn you and the other Kims-in-Charge into some sort of pasty goo on the floor. 

Why? 

Because they, unlike your hell-hole  dump of a country, are part of a civilized world to which you will never belong.

Now, here's why your missile launched from a sub is a pointless exercise: Should you ever use such a missile in anger, you will shortly thereafter be a dead former Kim-in-Charge.

Just saying.

Your implacable enemy,
E1

And here's a wonderful video of the great launch, with the most irritating announcer ever: (the real action starts at about 2:58)