Korean Horns On The Brink Of Nuclear War (Daniel 7:7)

On the brink of destruction: The real NUCLEAR threat if North Korea attacks the South

NORTH Korea and South Korea are on the brink of war – but what do we know about the two nations?

By Rory McKeown / Published 21st August 2015

The North has reportedly instructed its army to “enter a wartime state” and be “fully battle ready to launch surprise operations” after weeks of high tension with the South.

Crackpot dictator Kim Jong-un threatened military action if South Korea carried on pumping anti-North propaganda over the border through huge speakers in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ).
Kim also threatened action against the South and the West if a planned joint military exercise with the US went ahead on Monday.

The two nations exchanged military fire on Thursday (August 20) as tensions boiled over.

Jong-Un ordered his troops to be on a war footing from 5pm on Friday (9:30am GMT)and issued an ultimatum to the South to cease broadcasts by Saturday evening – or face military action.

North Korea is a notoriously secretive nation – while South Korea is allies with the West – but what do we know about the nations on the brink of conflict?

North Korea and South Korea have been divided since the end of World War 2 which led to the Korean War in 1950.

Since then the North and South have been at loggerheads and the tensions could be about to break into conflict.

The Korean War is still technically on-going as the two sides only signed an armistice.

NORTH KOREA

The citizens of North Korea follow the Juche ideology – a “creative application of Marxism-Leninism”.

It means education and food production are subsidised or state-funded but hundreds of thousands of people died in a famine in the late 1990s, and the country has struggled with food production since.
But the country ploughs millions into its military strength.

The Korean People’s Army consists mainly of ground forces, the navy and the air force and has 1.19million people – out of a population of 25,000,000 – on active duty according to its Military Balance 2011report.

It has one of the largest armies in the world.

Much has been made in the Western world of its nuclear threat.

In 2002, President George W Bush have a famous speech describing North Korea as part of the “Axis of Evil” including Iraq and Iran due to its steadfast approach to international relations and nuclear development programme.

It has carried out three underground nuclear tests since 2006 and it wasn’t until a year later that the government confirmed it had nuclear weaponry in its arsenal.

Siegfried Heckler, a nuclear expert at Stanford University’s Centre for International Security and Cooperation, estimated North Korea has enough weaponised plutonium for up to eight nuclear bombs.
Successful nuclear tests were also carried out in 2009 and 2013 despite international pressure to stop its nuclear programme.

It is understood North Korea has a range of long and short range missiles, some developed by the Soviet Union, and thousands of tonnes of chemical weapons including mustard gas, sarin and other nerve agents.

According to the CIA World Factbook: “North Korea’s history of regional military provocations; proliferation of military-related items; long-range missile development; WMD programs including tests of nuclear devices in 2006, 2009, and 2013; and massive conventional armed forces are of major concern to the international community.

“The regime in 2013 announced a new policy calling for the simultaneous development of its nuclear weapons program and its economy.”

North Korea’s main ally is China, which provides fuel and food aid, while it maintains a close relationship with Russia.

However positive ties with the US and South Korea are non-existent.

The promotion of Kim Jong-un has leader following the death of his father Kim Jong-Il in 2011 has done little to improve that.

Last year the secretive nation was brought to the forefront of the world’s news agenda last year following the production of American political comedy film The Interview.

Starring Seth Rogen and James Franco, the story surrounded two journalists who set up an interview with Kim Jong-un but are recruited by the CIA to assassinate him.

But the film proved controversial in North Korea and it threatened “stern” and “merciless” action against the US if it was released.

The portrayal of the president being assassinated was seen as an “act of war”.

It led to film distributors Sony Picture Entertainment being hacked by a group with ties to North Korea.

The threat led to many cinemas refusing to show the film and it was only released at selected cinemas.

However it managed to rake in around £17million in digital rentals, making it one of the most successful digital releases.

SOUTH KOREA

The South unleashed a relentless propaganda campaign to its enemy in the north after it claimed several of its soldiers were injured by land mines planted by the North in the Demilitarised area between the two nations.

It has rested to playing anti-Pyongyang messages through large speakers along the boarder.

And tensions heightened as Jong-Un threatened military retaliation if the broadcasts don’t cease.

If a conflict does erupt, the Republic of Korea Armed Forces will face a much larger army but will have significantly more advanced weaponry at its disposal.

The South’s army boasts around 630,000 active personal – almost half of what the North has – but has nearly 3,000,000 in reserve, making it one of the largest armed forces in the world.

It allocated £35trillion to its military budget last year and its arsenal has shells, missiles, and air defence weapons.

The air force also uses a number of aircrafts built by the US.

If The GOP Has It Their Way, Iran Will Be Nuclear Ready By Next Year

The Danger of a Failed Iran Deal

If you want a nuclear Middle East, there’s no better way than to let Tehran walk away.

By GARY SICK

March 08, 2015

In national security policy, you must always be careful what you wish for. Policies with short-term appeal often come with disagreeable longer-term consequences. And that may be exactly what is happening on Capitol Hill as politicians line up against a nuclear deal with Iran.

Today, there are many who are prepared to reject a negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran on the grounds that a return to coercive pressure and isolation will ensure the elimination of the entire Iranian nuclear capability and extend that “zero probability” of a nuclear weapon into the indefinite future. This is close to the position that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid out in his speech to Congress last week.

Certainly, turning back the clock and eliminating every aspect of nuclear know-how in Iran would be desirable. But proponents of an even more coercive policy should recognize that if they get their wish, they may create a security threat far greater than the limited threat they are now trying to prevent.

We don’t need a fortuneteller or crystal ball to predict the outcome of such a policy. We have more than three decades of experience to draw upon, based on the policies of eight successive American presidents and four presidents of Iran. Over that period of time, Iran has been subjected to a wide variety of sanctions and pressures. Originally these were mostly unilateral pressures from the U.S., but under the Obama administration they have become far more international and far-reaching, culminating in the crippling sanctions on Iran’s oil sales and its ability to access international financial markets.

Twice, Iran has come to the negotiating table. The first time was in 2003-05, when the Iranian negotiating team of Hassan Rohani and Javad Zarif — not yet president and foreign minister — made a proposal to cap Iran’s centrifuges at about 3,000. The United States was not a direct participant in those talks with several European states, but it is widely acknowledged that the George W. Bush administration vetoed the talks for essentially the same reason as opponents of the present negotiations. It was believed that the danger of permitting Iran to operate several thousand centrifuges was too great. Moreover, the coercive pressures available to the United States and the international community had scarcely been tried, and sanctions had not really begun to bite.
We all know what happened. With sanctions increasing almost by the day, and with increasing threats of a unilateral attack by Israel (which would probably draw in the U.S. and others), Iran steadily increased its nuclear program. By the time Rohani and Zarif returned to the field in 2013, Iran had about 20,000 centrifuges installed in two major sites — one of them deep underground — and a substantial stockpile of enriched uranium. Some of the uranium was enriched to nearly 20 percent, which is well on the way to weapons level.

That situation was so alarming that Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly displaying a cartoon drawing that showed a bomb filling with 20 percent enriched uranium. He estimated that it would arrive at the red line — enough to produce a bomb’s worth of highly enriched uranium very quickly — by the following summer. Many close observers of Israel believed that an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure was imminent.

Netanyahu, in various capacities, had been warning of an imminent Iranian nuclear weapon since at least 1992, when he told the Israeli Knesset that Iran could have a bomb in three to five years. He and others, in Israel and elsewhere, have made similar predictions almost annually for the past two decades.

It is easy to dismiss these predictions as fear-mongering about something that obviously never happened. But it is much more instructive to understand that what they were saying had a basis in fact: During this entire period, Iran was steadily increasing its capability to produce a nuclear bomb. The more interesting fact is that Tehran did not follow through. By virtually every estimate, Iran has had the capability to produce a nuclear weapon for at least a decade. The predictions were wrong, not about Iran’s ability but about its willingness to use that capability to produce a weapon. The entire U.S. intelligence community and most of our allies — apparently including Israel — have concluded with high confidence that Iran has not made a decision to build a bomb.

The second round of multilateral negotiations with Iran is approaching the finish line. The details have not been announced, but the outlines of an agreement seem to be emerging. Netanyahu’s cartoon bomb has been drained. It is now empty of 20 percent enriched uranium, and all indications point to the fact that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium will be severely limited for the foreseeable future. Iran is the world’s most inspected state. It has apparently agreed to accept vigorous international inspection in perpetuity in return for an agreement that lifts the most onerous sanctions on its commerce. Iran has ceased development of its heavy water reactor at Arak, which produces plutonium — the shortest route to weapons-quality fissile material — and will modify it permanently. And the most severe restrictions ever imposed on a state will reportedly be accepted for a decade or more before Iran is gradually permitted to assume its position as a “normal” member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which explicitly prohibits Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, if this agreement is rejected, as the Israeli prime minister and many in Congress are proposing, we go back to the early days of 2013: heavy sanctions, a rapidly increasing Iranian nuclear program and a looming threat of war. That is surely something no responsible statesman or politician would wish to see.

Gary Sick, a scholar at Columbia University, served on the National Security Council under Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/iran-nuclear-program-negotiations-115877.html#ixzz3TrMhUGyV