Quote:
Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
At this point there's not much that can be done without the radical happening.
A air raid would probably be murdered, North Korea has always been considered Russia's lab when it comes to designing air defense systems, and Kim Jr has spend lavishly on it.
There is a dire lack of human intelligence gathering in North Korea, and I doubt that the weapons assembly plant location is even known, its also unlikely that they are storing the bomb making material at a known location.
Its also likely that these facilities are extremely hardened against air strikes, so even if a air or cruise missile strike short of nuclear is successful there's no way of knowing if the materials, manufacturing area and the skilled workers have been destroyed.
The U.S. marine corp has extensively practiced small unit amphibious units expressly trained with removing nuclear threats and smashing weapons producing power plants, however there is not enough good intelligence to know where the manufacturing facilities and assembly plants are located so a on the ground mission would fail.
In this case even a political solution doesn't work because Kim doesn't care if we cut off food and money and starve his citizens to death, and he'll likely turn to other sources of money in exchange for technologies and skilled people export if he has to.
The only solution is to let him assemble the weapons and increase satellite recon over North Korea to find the launch sites which will most likely follow the soviet doctrine of being mobile. If they NK's use fixed launch sites for their medium and long range missiles the missiles themselves will be liquid fueled which means that they aren't always ready to launch and are fueled before launch which takes 30 minutes. With the short range mobile solid fuel rockets they merely have to take the cammo netting off raise the gantry and fire which takes 10 minutes.
No you basically let them finish the missiles at this point, pin point the sites and launchers with satellite. Put additional assets in the ocean with cruise missile capabilities, maybe offer the South Korean's their own deterrence forces with short range nuclear missiles. Also the American's also let Kim know that they've targeted North Korea cities with several squadrons of ballistic missiles.
At this point the genie is well and out of the bottle and you can't stuff it back in.
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Personally I would continue the policy of getting/encouraging the Japanese to continue to build their ahhh ummm defense force up. They should be far more of a counterweight in the region than they are.