Anddd Boom goes the (N.Korean) nuclear dynamite

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by mikey_the_redneck

Blame America for North Korea having nuclear weapons capability. They are the ones who secretively sold the technology to North Korea during previous presidential administration.

I'd be interested in this, can you provide links or proof, because this is the first I've heard of it

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I'd be interested in this, can you provide links or proof, because this is the first I've heard of it

I'm going to guess infowars.com seeing as he mentions it as a "great site" in this thread.

http://forum.calgarypuck.com/showthr...t=74872&page=9


In other words, it's BS.

[CaptainCrunch]

I've just never heard of it or seen it proven, and considering that the U.S. has posted soldiers in south Korea and Japan is a Taiwan is a major U.S. naval port that they wouldn't provide the North Koreans with actual bomb technology or power plants that could create bomb material.

But I try to keep an open mind.

[jolinar of malkshor]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I've just never heard of it or seen it proven, and considering that the U.S. has posted soldiers in south Korea and Japan is a Taiwan is a major U.S. naval port that they wouldn't provide the North Koreans with actual bomb technology or power plants that could create bomb material.

But I try to keep an open mind.

Previous agreements in the past have been around providing nuclear tech for electrical generation not weapons. Thats probably what he is refering to. Completely different.

[CaptainCrunch]

Thats what I was thinking as well. Not all nuclear powerplants create weapons grade materials.

[mikey_the_redneck]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I'd be interested in this, can you provide links or proof, because this is the first I've heard of it

Okay hold on..............I'm at work but I will post a link today when I can.......I belive they linked it to the Clinton administration.

[CaptainCrunch]

kewl

[mikey_the_redneck]

Here it is Captain!

http://www.infowars.com/north-koreas...us-government/

There are more where this came from. It bends your mind a little for sure.

[CaptainCrunch]

Ok, I see, this is a little less sinister then I first believed.

This is more of a failed foreign policy decision by Bill Clinton then anything else in terms of trying to appease North Korea to give up its nuclear program.

Yes - The American's did give the NK's a light water reactor because as much as the gentleman in your article states that its basically an easy act to create nuclear weapons from a light water plant, he's being a bit misleading.

There are two ways to make bomb material, 1 is to take fresh fuel and enrich it through the use of centrifuges. However there is a fail safe in light water plants with this method that in order to get at the fresh fuel you have to basically shut the reactor down and extract the fuel rods by lifting the massive containment lid off of the reactor, you also have to remove all of the rods to do this which means that the plant can't be restarted without fresh fuel. Its very easy for nuclear inspectors to pick up on this, thats why light water reactors are very popular in terms of non proliferation.

The second way of producing bomb material is to take spent fuel rods and reprocess them into bomb material. Light water reactors are built for commercial uses and run for a long period of time on a single batch of fuel. Because the light water plants use standard water (and I'm going from memory here) it creates a longer burning reaction that fills out the plutonium with other less bomb valuable materials that make it far more expensive and far less efficient to make it into bomb material.

From my understanding the NK's made their bomb material at heavy water research reactors built by the Russians for them.

Where the biggest blunder from Clinton was he gave the North Korean's nuclear plants, fuel, food and a ton of money so that they would stop their bomb program. Instead of using the money on infrastructure and feeding his starving people, Kim siphoned the money into his bomb program, used the food to feed his soldiers instead of his citizens and gave the fuel to the military. So in effect the Korean's used American money and supplies to build their bomb.

So to me, this isn't some sinister plot by the American's to play both sides of the fence, or to make money on Korea's nuclear bomb program. It was a failed bid for appeasment that utterly failed because they couldn't dictate and monitor the conditions that Kim operated under when they asked him to stop his bomb program.



Can you build bombs from

[mikey_the_redneck]

Captain....................what about this quote here;

Quote from article:
Rumsfeld was merely picking up the baton from the Clinton administration, who in 1994 agreed to replace North Korea’s domestically built nuclear reactors with light water nuclear reactors. So-called government-funded ‘experts’ claimed that light water reactors couldn’t be used to make bombs. Not so according to Henry Sokolski, head of the Non-proliferation Policy Education Centre in Washington, who stated, “LWRs could be used to produce dozens of bombs’ worth of weapons-grade plutonium in both North Korea and Iran. This is true of all LWRs — a depressing fact U.S. policymakers have managed to block out.”

The U.S. State Department claimed that the light water reactors could not be used to produce bomb grade material and yet in 2002 urged Russia to end its nuclear co-operation with Iran for the reason that it didn’t want Iran armed with weapons of mass destruction. At the time, Russia was building light water reactors in Iran. According to the State Department, light water reactors in Iran can produce nuclear material but somehow the same rule doesn’t apply in North Korea.

End quote from article.

[CaptainCrunch]

Again I go back to the top quote, you can basically build nuclear bombs material from any power plant as long as you can either retract the fresh fuel rods. Or refine the spent fuel rods.

Light Power plants make it extremely tough to do either. to get the fresh rods, you have to pull off the massive containment lid and remove all the rods which shuts the plant down. also its very easy for Nuclear inspectors to figure out if this has been done. Its extremely expensive.

If you want to use the spent fuel rods, because of normal water use, it creates a spent rod thats not efficient for creating bomb materials because of the addition or waste products and deuterium (sp?) in the spent rods it becomes extremely expensive and time consuming and you need a massive amount of spent fuel rods to create even one bomb.

In combination with North Korea opening up their reactors to inspectors and shutting down the rest of their bomb making facilities, it shouldn't have mattered that it was a light water plant because any attempt to use it to make bomb materials would have been picked up and reported by the UN inspectors.

This is about Kim tossing out the inspectors.

Plus the bomb materials didn't come from these reactors, from my understanding they mainly created the materials from either their own home built reactors that used heavy water or the Russian created research heavy water reactor that was built decades ago when the Russians and Chinese gave Kim bomb making designs.

The light water plants that the American's sent to Kim were put in place in the hopes that Kim would shut down his own reactors and used the new ones to generate power. It wasn't part of some scheme on the American's parts to furnish NK with bomb materials.

It was more about Clinton being lazy or stupid or both, not about some doubleday plot.

[JohnnyFlame]

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.

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.

[mikey_the_redneck]

Captain.........your knowledge of nuclear bomb building is kind of freaky. Hopefully you aren't trying to make one in your basment or anything.

[CaptainCrunch]

making a nuclear bomb is easy, its getting the material and the precise shaping thats hard.

Plus the explosive triggers are pretty expensive.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by JohnnyFlame

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.

I don't know about the Japanese self defense forces, but they do have a fairly impressive Navy, and have destroyers with Aegis capabilities which could in theory knock ballistic missiles down.

They designed their own really excellent tank in the type 90.

Their airforce is a little long in the tooth, however they do have a bunch of the F-15J's which is their own variant, and I think they're going to be replacing them with the Mitsibishi F2 which is their own take on the FS-X program based on the F-16 frame.

They do need to improve their ABM technology and their maritime warning system.

[Gozer]

I tossed out a thanks, but I want to post a thank you to Cruch for his helpful and enlightening posts.

[LChoy]

Unfortunately, China likes to be the big boy of the block, so they would object to Japan arming up to any more than a "Defence Force"
Actually, it's China's best interest not to have a bomb as they would like to be the only one in the region with that kind of strategic might. They have been more fence sitting than enouraging the North Korean regime, sort of caught in the middle between the West and North Korea

[metallicat]

Originally Posted by Gozer

I tossed out a thanks, but I want to post a thank you to Cruch for his helpful and enlightening posts.

Easily one of the most knowledgeable posters on CP. My nomination for CPs Hart Trophy.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

It was more about Clinton being lazy or stupid or both, not about some doubleday plot.

And a side-effect of the cozying up to China which started back in Bush Senior's day; the US could never put real pressure on North Korea because China sees them as being in its sphere of influence, and the US-China relationship was seen as too important to jeopardize. Clinton should have told the Chinese that a necessary pre-condition of the increased trade and normalized relations was that N. Korea be reigned in and made to behave, but instead the administration chose to believe in diplomacy with all carrots and no stick. Bush Jr was no better with his pathetic need to keep all Taiwan/Korea issues quiet while he was spending a trillion dollars on killing Saddam Hussein.

Now the Chinese are probably just as afraid of North Korea as everyone else; the Chinese military is good at killing students but its record against other nations is unimpressive. North Korea is to China now as Israel is to the USA - a nation that expects military and economic support as its due, but feels little need to heed the wishes of its sponsor when they don't coincide with what they were already going to do. The Koreans no doubt see going nuclear as long-term insurance against China as much as the USA, and will have no compunction in blackmailing Beijing into keeping them afloat no matter what the UN decides to do as far as economic sanctions go.

So now there isn't really anything to be done short of hoping for revolution and regime overthrow, other than the vanishingly small hope of convincing the Chinese to invade and then rolling them up from both sides, which incidentally would probably kill or displace tens of millions of people before the war was over.

[FurnaceFace]

One things for sure, with his knowledge I'm glad The Captain isn't Kim's consultant.