Quite A Year For North Korea. What’s Next?

2017 has been quite a year for the Kim dynasty in North Korea. Ever since the Soviets gave control to Kim Il-sung in 1948, the North Koreans have been bent on military dominance. While this may seem like nothing more than a dictator running amok to the rest of the world, there really is some solid reasoning behind their madness.

One of the key goals for the Kim dynasty has been the reunification of the Korean peninsula under their rule. Their bid to reunify the Korean peninsula in 1950, starting the Korean War, was a failure, thanks to the intervention of the United States.

But that war never really ended. All we did was sign an armistice.

The only real outcome of the Korean War was to make North Korea and the United States bitter enemies. As with Japan in World War II, the North Koreans have come to realize that they will not be able to accomplish their goals, unless they can first stop the superpower that is getting in their way.

That means finding some way of neutralizing the United States’ massive amount of military power.

Here’s Why We Can Never Win Against North Korea!

Hence the North Korean fascination with developing nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them. The reasoning in Pyongyang, is that the only thing which can neutralize US military might is nuclear weapons.

The other thing that the North Koreans have done is to build the world’s largest submarine fleet. Traditionally, submarines are the biggest threat to aircraft carriers, the US government’s number one tool of choice, when it is necessary to project power into some part of the world. If the Korean War ever turns hot again, you can be sure that some of the first military forces we will have supporting the theater of conflict will fly off the decks of aircraft carriers.

But until recent times, we’ve been able to ignore all this. President after president has kicked the can of the North Korean threat down the road, attempting to placate the North Koreans and keeping their aggression under control at the same time.

All that has changed in the last year. Left-leaning politicians and the news media have hammered President Trump mercilessly over his ongoing word battle with Kim Jong-un. They have seen it as an unnecessary escalation of tensions between the United States government and the government of Pyongyang.

There’s just one problem with that though, it assumes that everything is the same as it was before… and it’s not.

Things are distinctly different today, than they were at the beginning of the year. 2017 opened with North Korean being the normal nuisance we’ve all come to expect. They made what were thought to be idle threats, while mistreating their own population, starving them so that they could spend their money on military research.

That research has paid off handsomely for the North Korean ruler, as North Korea has made breakthrough after breakthrough, taking us from relative safety to imminent danger. In the last few months, they have tested their first multi-stage nuclear device, what they claim is a hydrogen bomb, giving them nuclear weapons that are ten times stronger than what they had before, as well as being roughly on par with our own.

At the same time, 2017 has seen an increased number of missile launches out of North Korea, with each missile being more technologically advanced than its predecessor. At the beginning of the year, these launches were mostly laughable, with missiles exploding on launch, never reaching their target altitude, and demonstrating a large number of other problems.

Yet there has been a clear improvement in the performance of North Korea’s missiles. The last couple of them have been multi-stage devices, which are true ICBMs. With the launch of the Hwasong-15 missile in November, North Korea claims to now have the capability of launching ICBMs which have the capability of reaching the entire continental United States, carrying nuclear weapons to destroy the city of their choosing.

Video first seen on Fox News.

While some of this may be exaggeration and bravado, the technical realities are clear. A host of people track North Korea’s missile tests, including scientists working for the South Korean government and our own. Based upon their reports, not just North Korea’s, the Hwasong-15 is a formidable weapon, which directly threatens the USA.

All through this process, there has been an amazing amount of unbelief being expressed by pundits and experts alike. Each advance has been explained away with talk about the huge hurdles that North Korea still has to overcome, in order to field effective nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

But that seems more and more like wishful thinking, than any true analysis. The North Koreans have either sidestepped these hurdles or have shown their ability to overcome them.

One of the big hurdles that didn’t appear was the necessity to “miniaturize” their nuclear weapons. We heard about that ad-nauseam, as the news hammered the story that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. But then a report from the Obama years surfaced, showing that North Korea had been designing their nukes to be miniaturized from the beginning. So much for that “huge technical hurdle.” It simply vanished like the morning fog.

It’s quite possible that the same can be said for some of the other technical hurdles that have been mentioned. North Korean scientists have the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of the US missile program, as well as that of other countries.

While there is a huge amount of material that is highly classified, there is plenty that is openly available. Science is science, and it knows no security classification.

As with the “problem” of miniaturizing nukes, I’m sure that the North Koreans have been working on issues with reentry heat and aiming of their missiles. It’s even possible that they solved those problems long ago, as they were working on other issues. We really have no way of knowing.

Where Does This Leave Us?

The truth is that there is nothing stopping the North Koreans from launching a nuclear strike against the United States, Japan or South Korea, except the North Koreans themselves. Even though we have some missile defenses in place, we may not have enough to stop a concerted attack.

Besides, chances are that the North Koreans know what we have, where we have it and what those defenses’ capabilities are. While that information may very well be classified, those defenses have been around for enough time and tested sufficiently, so that there isn’t much about them that is truly secret anymore.

Any military plan has to take into account the capabilities of the enemy. So you can be sure that there are people in North Korea’s military who have looked at our anti-missile capabilities and are working on plans to overcome them.

This could mean shooting the missiles at us from a direction where we are not protected, overwhelming our defenses by sending too many missiles, or developing some technology that spoofs our missile defense.

The point is, there is little likelihood that the North Koreans are going to attack, before they are at least reasonably sure that their attack will be successful. So however they do it, you can be sure that it will be well planned, well coordinated and intended to succeed.

Chances are fairly good that at least part of their attack will be a high-altitude EMP. That would give them the most bang for their buck, limiting our ability to retaliate. Sending an EMP, along with some missiles fused for more conventional nuclear attack would be the best of both worlds for the North Koreans, essentially copying American nuclear war plans from the Cold War.

The problem for you and I is that our country is totally unprepared for such an attack. In many ways, we were better prepared in the 1960s, when people at least knew to “duck and cover.” While we have technology today, which we didn’t have back then, the general population is totally untrained in surviving either an EMP or a conventional nuclear exchange.

Worse than that, the government just de-established the EMP Commission, the country’s only group of true experts on EMP. So we don’t even have anyone in government service who is working on creating an EMP survival plan.

Of course, the government hasn’t paid much attention to the work that the EMP Commission did anyway. Congress never saw EMP survival as a priority, partially because there were no immediate, visible benefits, which would help them get reelected. So that can kept getting kicked on down the road as well.

What this means is that if we are going to survive an EMP or a conventional nuclear attack from North Korea, it’s going to be up to you and I to prepare for it on our own.

We can’t count on FEMA showing up with their mountains of red tape, or any other government agency raising a finger to ensure our survival. If we don’t ensure it ourselves, we’ll simply become part of the 90% of the population that the EMP Commission projects will die off in the first year after an EMP.

The Worst Possible Scenario

Of all the potential survival situations we face, surviving an EMP is probably the worst. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most likely. So it’s not the type of thing we can just ignore, hoping that it will never happen. That’s what all the sheeple out there are doing, making it so that they are the ones who will suffer, if North Korea ever does attack us.

An EMP attack would actually be more devastating than a conventional nuclear attack.

While a conventional attack would gut a number of our major cities, killing millions of people, the area affected by each nuclear explosion would actually be rather limited. An EMP, on the other hand, has the potential of shutting down the entire country, leaving us without any sort of electrical power or infrastructure we could count on.

It is the loss of the infrastructure which will ultimately cause something like 300 million deaths, not the EMP itself. Without electrical power and the infrastructure that depends on it so much, movement of critical supplies, like food, from production to market would come to a stop. Without food and supplies, people will be dependent on only what is available where they live. When that gets used up, they’ll be in trouble.

There will be a race between starvation and those who are working to reestablish the electrical grid. But I fear that starvation will win. The necessary materials to rebuild the grid just don’t exist, so they will have to be made.

That takes too long, as the normal lead time for the transformers used in electrical sub-stations is a year. There just isn’t the production capability to make tens of thousands of them on a rush basis. Nor will there be the raw material available or the ability to create that raw material. Other than a few select areas, people will have to learn how to survive without electricity.

The problems caused by the loss of the grid will clearly be more severe in the cities, than it will be in rural areas. The sheer mass of people competing for limited resources will cause a huge increase in crime, as people seek food, creating gang-style warfare. Surviving the months following an EMP will require a combination of self-sufficiency and the ability to defend yourself and your resources.

Some smaller communities might band together, sharing resources and helping each other out. But this is much more likely in communities where there will be an abundance of resources, such as rural farming communities. People living in such communities are used to working together and helping each other out anyway, making it much easier for them to work together in a post-EMP world.

For the rest of us, survival of the fittest will become the rule.

No food stockpile will be big enough to sustain a family until things return to normal. Rather, the people who will do the best will be those who can quickly adapt to sustaining themselves, converting their home and property into a homestead.

Are you ready?

This article has been written by Bill White for Survivopedia.

References:

https://www.globalfirepower.com/navy-submarines.asp