BREAKING NEWS: North Korea claims nuclear test!

[SlowwHand]

So much for the "no seismic activity" theory.

Quake raises fears of 2nd N. Korea test
AP - 17 minutes ago

TOKYO - A strong earthquake shook northern Japan on Wednesday and Japanese media reported the government had detected tremors in North Korea as well, leading it to suspect Pyongyang had conducted a second nuclear test. But Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as saying he had no information to confirm a second North Korean test had taken place and U.S. and South Korean monitors said they detected no new seismic activity Wednesday in North Korea.

[DRoseDARs]

This has already been confirmed to just be a plain old Terra attackquake on Northen Japan by the Sea of Japan. Bombing of the sea in retaliation begins in five minutes...



It was a 6.0 (current estimate) in the Sea of Japan, nothing more.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Proteus_MST
But what should we do with the radioactive wasteland that was once North Korea in this case?

Think back fondly to the days when it was a mere garden-variety half-industrialized wasteland dotted with prison camps?

[Nubclear]

A tornado in Kansas! It must be teh north korea weather control machine!!!1

[DRoseDARs]

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/ustrb2.php

Magnitude
5.8 (Moderate)
# Date-Time
Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 23:58:07 (UTC)
= Coordinated Universal Time
# Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 9:58:07 AM
= local time at epicenter
Time of Earthquake in other Time Zones
Location
37.252°N, 142.722°E
Depth
30.1 km (18.7 miles) set by location program
Region
OFF THE EAST COAST OF HONSHU, JAPAN
Distances
165 km (100 miles) E of Iwaki, Honshu, Japan
195 km (120 miles) SE of Sendai, Honshu, Japan
205 km (130 miles) ESE of Fukushima, Honshu, Japan
320 km (200 miles) NE of TOKYO, Japan

Location Uncertainty
horizontal +/- 7.7 km (4.8 miles); depth fixed by location program
Parameters
Nst=170, Nph=170, Dmin=410 km, Rmss=1.03 sec, Gp=108°,
M-type=moment magnitude (Mw), Version=7
Source
USGS NEIC (WDCS-D)
Event ID
ustrb2

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Comrade Tassadar
A tornado in Kansas! It must be teh north korea weather control machine!!!1

lol

Seriously, for North Korea to have detonated a nuke strong enough to rattle Japan with a 5.8 earthquake would mean they have thermonuclear devices, not just measly atomic bombs. The Soviet Union detonated a 50-mT device that registered as a 7.0; the wave travelled around the world 3 times. A 5.8 is exponentially more powerful than a 3.2(?), so North Korea would have to have exploded several megatons to do it. Raise your hand if you think that's what happened here...

[Adam Smith]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Christ-on-a-m*therf*cking crutch. Now the GOP is trying to blame this on Clinton -- and they've rolled out former maverick/current lapdog John McCain to do it:

McCain criticizes Clinton on N. Korea

If Clinton had never been president, they'd probably be trying to pin it on Carter.

Rufus:

I don't understand why your knickers are in such a twist over McCain's statement. Quoting from the article,

Democrats have argued President Clinton presented his successor with a framework for dealing with North Korea and the Republican fumbled the opportunity.

"I would remind Senator (Hillary) Clinton and other Democrats critical of the Bush administration's policies that the framework agreement her husband's administration negotiated was a failure,"

As I read it, the Democrats initially claim that they provided the makings of a solution, and the Republicans screwed it up. The Republicans then claim that the Democrats didn't have such a great solution to begin with. This sound to me like nothing more than the standard finger pointing by both sides, wrapped around a diplomatic question that people can legitimately debate.

I would be interested in hearing your diplomatic perspective on this issue. It is easy to argue that the current policy is bad because it clearly did not produce the desired result. As far as alternative policies go, IIRC, at one time we offered incentives, NK took them, and then did not hold up their agreement. Perhaps Kim Jong-il would have felt better if we had "just sat down and listened to him" in bilateral negotiations, but how can you predict how a "meglomanaical dwarf" will respond? Can you reach any meaningful agreement without China, South Korea, and Japan signing off? Why is bilateralism the correct approach here, while multilateralism is more appropriate in other cases? Is there some other policy that could reasonably have been expected to work better? I would guess that this is as big a headache for China as it is for us, since IIUC they were pretty much taking the lead and have more to lose in the short term.

[pchang]

China has more to lose period

Why they continue to prop up NK, I'll never understand.

[SlowwHand]

Rufus is about to hemorrhage over a situation even North Korean allies find unacceptable.
Go figure.

[Berzerker]

"Why they continue to prop up NK, I'll never understand."

[joncha]

So they can look relatively sane. It's the classic ugly friend strategem.

[Nubclear]

But South Korea would still exist

[Barnabas]

This is all Bush´s Fault!

Grrrrr


j/k


North Korea is basically saying, feed me and give me oil, or I collapse, go mad, attack and kill millions

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Adam Smith

Rufus:

I don't understand why your knickers are in such a twist over McCain's statement. Quoting from the article,

As I read it, the Democrats initially claim that they provided the makings of a solution, and the Republicans screwed it up. The Republicans then claim that the Democrats didn't have such a great solution to begin with. This sound to me like nothing more than the standard finger pointing by both sides, wrapped around a diplomatic question that people can legitimately debate.

Evaluating whether the Dems would have had a better solution is an exercise in alternative history, and not very productive.

But that's not why my knickers are in a knot.

They're in a knot because, regardless of whose plan was better, the administration has been massively distracted from dealing with NK at all because of its all-consuming debacle in Iraq. And I do mean all-consuming; all manner of diplomacy has been shelved, and funds to pursue it cut, so that everything can be funneled Baghdad-ward.

The Bushies knew what was going on in NK the minute they took office; that's how NK ended up as part of the Axis of Evil. They've had six years to actually deal effectively with NK. And have they? No. Why? Because everything necessary to deal with Dear Leader -- robust diplomacy, military capability backing that diplomacy, and the ability to forge coalitions with other nations to make that diplomacy stick -- all of it has been squandered on Iraq.

When the history is written, the tragedy of Iraq won't just be that we lost, or that it was pointless, or that it actually helped fuel Islamic terrorism; it will also be that it shifted the focus away from real problems that required serious attention until it was too late. NK will be Exhibit A.

That's what pisses me off about this. The attempt to fob off blame on the Clinton administration is just the shabby, pathetic icing on the cake, and par for the course for this Administration (whose talking points I'm sure McCain was reading).

[RGBVideo]

IMHO the current nuclear weapons' project of DPRK was started in the mid-90s: I think it takes around 10 years for such a low-resource, low-infrastructure country to get this far from scratch, if the reported nuclear test was succesful. These things have always been pretty long-term projects (think how long Manhattan project took, and that was with the resources of USA).

Iranian government is stupid if it doesn't follow suit ASAP. Depending on whether they started their program in 2003 (observing what happened to Iraq) or now (observing and comparing what happened to Iraq and DPRK), we should see their nuke test during the first part of the next decade. Presuming there will not be outside intervention.

1. NK would have been at least ten times harder to invade than Iraq.

no