Missiles and madness(North Korea Military Info)

North Korea is by any international standard a failed or failing state. Yet it has a massive missile arsenal, a considerable and successful nuclear-weapons program, and one of the largest armed forces in the world.

Why? For its huge conventional military power, the answer is usually to both suppress its own civilian population and to protect against a US-South Korean invasion.

Neither is a satisfactory explanation, for in truth a highly pervasive internal security infrastructure and a people cowed by 60 years of unbending communist rule are probably more than enough to ensure the survival of the current regime for the foreseeable future. The United States and South Korea are highly unlikely to launch aground invasion of North Korea individually or jointly. Nor is the North likely to make another attempt to conquer the South.

Pyongyang's forces may be sufficient to achieve some success on the ground in the first week, but after that their limited logistic support combined with ferocious US-led air strikes would have so degraded the offensive capability of the main combat units as to lead to only one conclusion: another military disaster.

This time, and more important, it is highly unlikely that there would be a repeat of the Korean War intervention by hundreds of thousands of seasoned Chinese troops pouring across the Yalu River to rescue the North Korean regime from the consequences of its own stupidity.

It would be an act of state suicide for North Korea to resort to the use of nuclear weapons to attempt to win or indeed even to prevent its eventual defeat. The US response would undoubtedly be to turn the whole of North Korea into a radioactive wasteland for generations to come.

1 posted on 08/17/2006 9:30:20 PM PDT by Marius3188

I don't believe that NK has any weapon nuclear weapon at this time. The RATS would like you to believe that NK went on some type of Manhattan Project the very day Bush was sworn in.

If they don't test they don't got.

2 posted on 08/17/2006 9:40:14 PM PDT by Mike Darancette (This space for rent.)

If that article is anywhere near accurate, NK seems to have an astounding amount of hardware. 120 Nukes? That part seems overly ambitious, but who knows?

3 posted on 08/17/2006 9:50:00 PM PDT by Attention Surplus Disorder (You're never more than a half-step away from a good note.)

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