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North Korea Deploys Missiles, Targets Fighter Jets
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
November 28, 2010
North Korea upped the ante on Sunday as South Korea and the United States conduct military exercises described as a show of force in response to North Korea’s artillery bombing of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last week.
North Korea’s missiles “appear to be targeting our fighter jets that fly near the Northern Limit Line (NLL),” a source told the Yonhap New Agency. The Soviet-designed SA-2 missile has a range of between 13 and 30 kilometers. “The military is preparing for the possibility of further provocations as the North Korean military has deployed firepower near the NLL and is preparing to fire,” the source said.
Other missiles on the North Korean west coast, such as the Samlet and Silkworm with ranges of up to 95km, have also been put onto launch pads, the source said.
The Hoguk series of exercises that began earlier this month in South Korea include 70,000 South Korean troops. Exercises built around the USS George Washington carrier battle group in the Yellow Sea began Sunday. The Pentagon claims both sets of exercises are built around deterrence and are in response to the sinking of the Cheonan.
In August, the Obama administration used the Cheonan incident as a pretext to impose additional economic sanctions on North Korea. On May 20, South Korea officially blamed North Korea for the sinking of its warship in March. Investigators from Australia, Britain, Sweden and the United States arrived at the conclusion that North Korea sunk the vessel with a torpedo. Investigators said the torpedo was likely of German manufacture.
“There are suspicions that the US Navy SEALS maintains a sampling of European torpedoes for sake of plausible deniability for false flag attacks,” investigative journalist Wayne Madsen wrote in May. “Also, Berlin does not sell torpedoes to North Korea, however, Germany does maintain a close joint submarine and submarine weapons development program with Israel.”
Wayne Madsen talks about a possible false flag on the Alex Jones Show in May.
China has called for emergency talks between North and South Korea in a bid to avoid a possible military conflict. China is North Korea’s most important ally, primary trading partner, and main source of food, arms, and fuel.
Special envoy for Korea Wu Dawei told journalists that Beijing was proposing that chief negotiators from North and South Korea, the US, China, Japan and Russia should meet early December in Beijing. Wu Dawei said the talks would not be a resumption of the six-party dialogue, focussed on the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear program, which came to a halt last April. South Korea responded skeptically to China’s call for negotiations.
Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN over the weekend that North Korea’s dictator Kim Jung-il “is consistently destabilizing and is only predictable in his unpredictability. He galvanizes everyone around with the potential that they could go to war with South Korea,” the American Forces Press Service reports.
On Sunday, Arizona senator and former presidential candidate John McCain said the situation between North and South Korea presents an opportunity to take down the regime in North Korea. “I think it’s time we talked about regime change in North Korea,” he said, adding that he did not mean “military action.” McCain did not speculate how regime change would occur in North Korea without military involvement.
North Korea is the most militarized country in the world and has the fourth largest army in the world consisting of around 1,106,000 armed personnel, with about 20% of men ages 17–54 in the regular armed forces.
Also on Sunday, leaders in the U.S. Senate supported the military exercises with South Korea. “You don’t flinch,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, said on Fox News Sunday about the response of the United States to North Korea. Graham is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
North Korea has dug a new tunnel more than 500 m deep at a nuclear test
site in Punggye-ri, North Hamgyong Province, intelligence sources said
Tuesday. The North is also reportedly accelerating massive excavation
work and construction of a new building at its main nuclear site in Yongbyon.
"North Korea seems to be busy digging even in winter when the ground
is frozen" at Punggye-ri and Yongbyon, an intelligence officer said.
Based on an estimate of the amount of earth dug up, the intelligence
officer speculated that the North has already dug a cave more than 500
m deep in Punggye-ri.
"If progress goes on at the current pace, the North will have dug a cave
1 km deep, the depth where it is possible to conduct a nuclear test,
between March and May next year," the officer said.
Voice of America, quoting a U.S. Congressional Research Service report,
reported on Dec. 7 that the North could conduct a nuclear test as a proxy
for nuclear weapons developing nations such as Iran.
The North is also carrying out massive construction in Yongbyon. Experts including Siegfried Hecker, a U.S. nuclear scientist who visited Yongbyon last month, believe that the North is building a 25-30 MW reactor.
But a security official said, "The North has never admitted what it is building. We're just speculating that it's building a nuclear facility whose purpose is unclear."
Government officials believe the North does not have enough technical wherewithal to build a light-water reactor power plant that uses enriched uranium as fuel and suspect it is now openly attempting to build a highly-enriched uranium facility to produce nuclear weapons. They also suspect that the North has three or four more undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities in addition to the one in Yongbyon it showed Hecker last month.
South Korea and the U.S. are worried that the North could heighten tensions on the peninsula by using a nuclear threat after the artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island. It apparently aims to sway public opinion in the international community and South Korea in favor of early talks with the North by either conducting a third nuclear test or boosting its uranium-based nuclear capability.
Former chief U.S. nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill was quoted by VOA as saying that the North's disclosure of the uranium enrichment plant proves that the regime lied in the six-party talks.
By Bomi Lim and Shinhye Kang - Dec 14, 2010 10:00 AM ET
Fighter jets will buzz Seoul today to simulate an attack by North Korea as the South conducts its biggest emergency drill in response to the deadly shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.
Sirens will sound across the country at 2 p.m. local time, when workers from the National Emergency Management Agency will help guide people to more than 25,000 shelters, the group, known as NEMA, said in a statement yesterday. Traffic will stop for 15 minutes and drivers and pedestrians will be asked to take cover in nearby office basements and subway stations, the agency said.
The government scaled back monthly civil defense drills to as few as three per year by 1992 as South Koreans turned their attention to building an economy that’s made them 18 times richer on average than their communist neighbors, according to the central bank. The Nov. 23 strike that killed four people refocused attention on the border and the 250 North Korean long- range artillery pieces that U.S. Forces Korea says can strike the Seoul metropolitan area and its 23 million people.
“South Koreans became nonchalant to North Korean threats because most of their assaults happened off the coast or overseas,” said Ahn Cheol Hyun, head of the Ahn’s Institute of Crisis Management in Seoul. “The Yeonpyeong attack was a wake- up call to many and bolstering civil defense drills will be one way of raising people’s awareness of the real threat.”
Last month’s artillery attack, the first on South Korean soil since the 1950-53 war, followed the March sinking of a warship. An international investigation concluded that a North Korean torpedo was responsible for the incident, in which 46 South Korea sailors died.
Assassination Attempts
The North has been implicated in previous attacks on South Korea, including the 1987 bombing of a civilian airliner that killed 115 people, assassination attempts on presidents and incursions by submarines carrying commandos.
“These drills are taking place at a time when the threat of war is becoming more visible,” Park Yeon Soo, the chief of NEMA, told reporters yesterday in Seoul. “They will help us build confidence in dealing with North Korea’s provocations.”
Twelve Navy KF-16 jets will fly low over cities including Seoul and Busan, NEMA said. Classes in schools will be suspended as students evacuate to nearby shelters or wait for emergency instructions over the radio.
It will be the first time since 2000 that citizens are guided to shelters during the drills, which had typically been limited to forbidding pedestrians from crossing roads and requiring cars to pull off to the side.
School Drills
Byeon Hyun Su, a 15-year-old middle school student from Guri on Seoul’s eastern outskirts, said previous exercises were inadequate. During a 2009 drill for chemical and biological threats he and his classmates were simply told to crawl under their desks.
“We just chatted the whole time about how glad we were to be missing class,” said Byeon. “What good is training or hiding in the basement? We are all going to die anyway if North Korea fires missiles.”
The attack on Yeonpyeong, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) west of Seoul near the disputed sea border, shattered the windows of a school during class, set 30 houses ablaze and scorched 25 hectares of land.
North Korea deploys 70 percent of its 1.2 million troops within 90 kilometers of the Demilitarized Zone dividing the two counties, according to an October report by the U.S. Forces Korea. Seoul is about 40 kilometers south of the dividing line.
Little Warning
There is likely to be “little warning of attack” if North Korea ever attempts to invade, the U.S. State Department says on its website.
Most of the shelters in South Korea, including about 4,000 in Seoul, are subway stations and the basements of large buildings with thick concrete walls that make them safe from strikes, according to NEMA. Only a small number are purpose built air-raid shelters, the agency said.
The country’s 3.9 million civil defense corps members, made up of men aged between 20 and 40, are responsible for ensuring the safety of citizens in case of war, according to the National Disaster Information Center.
Corps members receive an annual four-hour training session in first aid, putting out fires and using gas masks in their first four years. From the fifth year, they receive one hour of training annually, the information center said on its website.
“South Koreans are among the least sensitive to risks,” said Steven Chon, country manager of Hill & Associates Ltd., a unit of G4S Plc, the world’s largest security company.
To contact the reporters on this story: Bomi Lim in Seoul at blim30@bloomberg.net; Shinhye Kang in Seoul at skang24@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bill Austin at billaustin@bloomberg.net
