Norks uses ballistic missile to launch silent 'satellite' The UN Security Council has threatened North Korea with the terrors of the Earth after its weekend ballistic missile test. Meanwhile, radio hams are gearing up to work out whether the satellite's making any contact with Earth. Norks' launch, which also put a satellite into orbit, the Kwangmyongsong-4, which was detected by …
the rest of the world suspects the launches are ballistic missile tests
I would say that's called "having a firm graps of the obvious"
Note that Sputnik was evidently a "ballistic missile test" even though it had a little radio transmitter as payload.
Also, Samantha Powers bleeding publicly for a peaceful world again and calling for "acts"? How are Libya and Syria coming, then?
I have no love whatsoever for the regimes in either Iran or North Korea. But, seriously, how can anyone blame them from trying to develop a nuclear defence?
If I was the tin-pot dictator or mediaeval voodoo peddlar in charge of one of these countries and was looking around the world at what's been happening to the neighbours the US has decided it doesn't like the look of [HINT: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria... ], I'd be cracking the whip across my nuclear scientists' backs as well, and ordering them to build me a nuclear deterrent as quick as they can.
The really sad thing is that there are people so monumentally gullible that, when a US politician describes these activities as "sinister plots to attack the USA", rather than as frantic attempts to shore up your own defences before Uncle Sam decides to come a-calling and bringing 'regime change' they actually believe it.
PS: Shame on El Reg's usually cynical journos for swallowing the 'official line' too.
HINT 2: As well as regime mismanagement of the economy, the reason North Korea's people are starving might also have something to do with the fact that the US has forbidden any of its lackeys from trading with the country. It's another standard American tactic:
**UNCLE SAM:** We don't like Country X, so we're going to impose crippling economic sanctions on them and also insist all our lickspittle 'friends' do too.
[Time passes]
**UNCLE SAM** Look at the state of Country X's economy. They can't even feed their own people!
@Ali Um Bongo
Can't agree more; I wonder how many Reg's journalists have been in NK to confirm their arguments? Like most journalist, when it comes to politics, they just parrot whatever the big media corps are coming up with.
Don't get me wrong, I consider The Reg a good source of tech news, but when it comes to politics, they just follow the stream.
If any particular person tells you they've been to NK, chances are they are lying. NK is one of the most closed countries on Earth; really the only people who ever cross the border with any frequency are Chinese. So when I read articles about what NK has been up to, those articles can come from one of only three possible sources. None of those is trustworthy when it comes to political subjects.
Good reasoning, except that you don't see Zimbabwe/Sudan/Cuba/other autocracies around the world threatening to turn their southern neighbor's capital into a "sea of fire" or advertising and plastering images of a burning White House/Statue of Liberty all over the place.
North Korea is no put-upon innocent that is only trying to defend itself from mean ol' Uncle Sam.
*"...North Korea is no put-upon innocent that is only trying to defend itself from mean ol' Uncle Sam..."*
Where did I say, or even imply that they were?
I thought the phrases: "I have no love whatsoever for the regimes in either Iran or North Korea..." and "If I was the tin-pot dictator or mediaeval voodoo peddlar in charge of one of these countries..." in my original post made that clear.
The point I was trying to make was that ***from their point of view*** [emphasis] they are being threatened by a country which has a track record as long as your arm of both crippling the economies of and intervening militarily in, countries whose regimes they don't approve of.
*"...you don't see Zimbabwe/Sudan/Cuba/other autocracies ... threatening to turn their southern neighbor's capital into a "sea of fire" or advertising and plastering images of a burning White House/Statue of Liberty all over the place..."*
I'm sure, if those countries felt threatened by outside invasion, this is exactly what they would be doing. As far as political sophistiction goes, this is school playground stuff:
"I'm going to kick your head in!"
"Well, if you try it I'm going to smash your face in!"
Like Saddam's "Mother of All Battles" nonsense, it is empty rhetoric for domestic consumption and intended to make 'Mr. T.P. Dictator' seem strong at home. It is about as close to having any connection to reality as labels like "Operation Enduring Freedom" are, when the US attaches them to its swathe of destruction in the Middle East.
It's all a question of perspective and, unfortunately, far too few people in the West ever bother to try and see it from the other guy's point of view, or question the lines spun by those in the Whitehouse, 10 Downing Street et al. Does anyone wih an ounce of critical thinking ability really believe North Korea [or Iran] are plotting to launch a war against the USA?
Presumably these people also think "Team America: World Police" was a documentary.
[I see your fail and raise you a Fuck, yeah!]
In 'Animal House' Dean Wormer put them under Double Secret Probation. I guess the UN could do that to NK.
The tactics the west use are not meant to influence North Korea - they are meant to placate the Daily Mail readers or equivalent at home. If they lead to nuclear war they might think 'You see! I told you so' just before they vaporise.
Sputnik was arguably a test of the R7 ICBM launcher, but the Soviets had already successfully tested it with a dummy warhead two months before, Sputnik was a test to see if they could use it to launch a satellite. For starters Sputnik weighed less than a nuke and had no re-entry options.
As it turns out, the R7 was a pretty terrible ICBM (big, slow to prepare, un-storable propellants etc), but it's a great space launcher (over 1600 successful launches and still going strong).
@Neoc:
"Nope, the main reason the USA (and the UN) is dragging their feet is NK's old pal China."
I'm afraid that just isn't true. China are just as pissed off with NK as the rest of the world is at the moment. The simple matter is it isn't financially viable for the USA to go in to NK and blow the place up.
Over the weekend, during a Republican Party debate, candidate Ted Cruz gained headlines and incredulity in equal measure by saying Norks is preparing to attack America with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon.
I'm sure he'd be only too happy to back up his claims by publishing his evidence.
OK, I won't hold my breath. It's not like he has evidence for anything else he claims to believe.
"It's not like he has evidence for anything else he claims to believe."
And that is different than the other candidates how?
However, I will say this. Ted Cruz punked the Sierra Club bad in a senate meeting.
Ted Cruz punked the Sierra Club bad in a senate meeting.
While Ted Cruz is quite a good debater, I fear you confuse sophistry with actual punking. He threw something out as an implied standard that he himself does not follow (e.g. link).
Ted Cruz is a nasty, small minded sophist and little else.
The excellent "More or Less" programme on Radio 4 revealed, following an analysis, that less than 35% of Cruz's statements (made during this electoral campaign) have any validity. The vast majority of things this man says are outright lies designed to rile a crowd rather than shed light on political issues.
He's another Trump, just a tad more savvy.
If it was a conventional ballistic missile test I would have expected it to splash down somewhere in the south pacific as a "launch malfunction". It did not.
My suspicion would be a loitering munitions. The biggest problem Norks have is that they have no submarines and their missiles are sticking out as a sore thumb on well known launch pads with no anti-missile defense. Their retaliation capability can be taken out in a matter of minutes by any major player without them being able to do anything about it. Single cruise missile launch off-shore and bye-bye threatening the entire world. A loitering nuke in space goes a very long way to reduce and remove this advantage. It does not need to communicate with ground too. All it needs is to accept its deorbit command and target coordinates.
Interesting idea, and strategically valid, I do believe, at the condition that the owner is the only entity that can give it the marching orders. But that is an issue for the spymasters to resolve.
The real issue is that orbits degrade. If you want a loitering anything, you need to include the necessary fuel and exhaust ports, plus comms and telemetry to know how high it is, how fast the orbit is degrading and when and how long the burn needs to take to recover an optimal amount of time before the next burn.
Given that there is currently no satellite in existence that can maintain orbital altitude on its own (even the expensive telecommunications satellites that are very valued by their owners and would certainly benefit from such technology), I'd venture that, if Western economies with their ready access to best-level physicists and boatloads of money do not include such tech, I highly doubt that the Norks have the brainpower, not to mention the resources, to do it on their lonesome.
But hey, ingenuity knows no bounds, so I'm willing to be surprised.
I highly doubt that the Norks have the brainpower, not to mention the resources, to do it on their lonesome.
Orbit degrades, kimchee heats up due to air resistance, kimchee starts emitting fermentation gases, fermentation vessel lid opens (by divine intervention from the Eternal Leader, its exhaust is directed to correct the satellite's orbit), altitude is restored. At the same time, any nearby capitalist-imperialist running dog satellites are corroded beyond repair by the fumes.
The real issue is that orbits degrade.
It is at 500 km up, that is relatively high so the drag is not very great. That is several years before it re-enters due to drag which is comparable to the shelf life of an early tech nuke.
It is also in polar orbit so it is guaranteed to pass over every single "target" area within a day or two. It also does not need to correct its orbit regularly to be an effective weapon - there is bugger all difference between it re-entering aiming for a major capital of your choice from 500km or from 300km. Equally effective, the sole thing to differ are the burn parameters which need to be transmitted once by the ground station right before attack. Similarly, even if the ground station needs telemetry before that it, can ask for it once - before attack. The likely target areas are hundreds of miles across so it does not need to be precise either.
With this orbit and this behavior, the odds are it is what the Norks are building. Even if they did not launch it this time, one of the next launches will be a live loitering nuke which will nicely nullify the fact that their launch pads are vulnerable and they have no subs and no bombers.
Indeed there are rocket bodies from launcher final stages and dead satellites like Prospero X3 which have been orbiting for decades without any need for a boost burn.
If they are going to be building a loiter weapon then they will at some stage need to test their re-entry and heat protection, otherwise their worst they can do is put a lot of radioactive waste into the upper atmosphere when the rest of the vehicle burns up.
"If they are going to be building a loiter weapon then they will at some stage need to test their re-entry and heat protection, otherwise their worst they can do is put a lot of radioactive waste into the upper atmosphere when the rest of the vehicle burns up."
Or maybe they've been reading about the possibility of satelliteageddon and it's just a stonking big nailbomb with which to blackmail the rest of the world.
I doubt the Norks have a targeting system capable of landing a payload with anything even closely resembling an accuracy beyond "somewhere down there on that big blue ball, hopefully on one of the solid bits".
On top of that they don't seem to have any testing done on re-entry protection and guidance. Pretty imporant stuff if you need a payload to survive re-entry
I'm willing to bet the US has the ability to tell whether there's a nuke onboard from the radiation. You can't effectively shield it in a space vehicle (nor would it be payload efficient to try but I'm not sure how close you'd need to sidle up to it to tell. Regardless, I imagine the US has one of its spy satellites tasked with a close enough fly by in the near future to check it out.
Presumably they'd want to test this before they put a nuke in orbit - it wouldn't do much good as a threat if you didn't know whether it would survive re-entry or not. This might be the dry run, if so it will end up ditching itself in the ocean soon in its re-entry test.
If the US finds it does contain a nuke, I very much doubt they'd make it public. They'd tell NATO, and South Korea and Japan of course (the most likely targets) but not us normal people. That makes this sort of thing perfect for political posturing like Ted Cruz's EMP weapon, because if asked to prove it the claim will be that the details are classified.
@ Ali Um Bongo:
I see your "Weltanschauung" and raise you a "Realpolitik mit Fingerspitzengefühl"...
The Norks have a pretty massive standing army. They might not be highly technologically advanced and they might not have the latest weaponry and tactics but if it DOES ever come to an armed conflict there will be MASSIVE casualties on all sides before the conflict is resolved. And lets not forget the US vastly underestimated the difficulties of fighting in the local terrain the last time they were out there playing soldier.
true they have a massive standing army... but lets face it the US has been developing remote control death machines for a reason. The US's predators, and reapers have done quite a bit of remote control havoc on places the US has fought with just imagine what new toys are making.
I wouldn't be shocked if the military wasn't working on(or have made already) fully remote control tanks that could run for days on end, along with fleets of newer designed drones that could launch bigger missiles more silently then the old ones.
They are probably working on those yes, but with the dense vegetation of the Korean jungle tanks are highly ineffective and tend to get bogged down and air to ground attacks are difficult because target acquisition is hindered by vegetation. Even in the last Korean war the US used lots and lots of air power, but there were plenty of reasons they needed boots on the ground. Those same reasons still stand today.
Do not have the illusion the US would just steamroll the Norks. If it ever comes to a war we (NATO nations) are in for a hell of fight.
ICBMs are pretty pointless these days as it's pretty obvious to see where they're coming from. There's no subtlety and no plausible deniability. The moment NK shoots a rocket anywhere, they'll be burnt to cinders. And if there's only one or two of them, there's a good chance of intercepting them. So the threat is minimal to non-existent. (But it gives the superpowers a good excuse to invest in missile-defense systems.)
North Korea- What the U.S. and Britain will look like in twenty years when 5 people hold all the Wealth and the rest of us are sucking on cardboard for breakfast. Such is the Beauty of Oligarchy! Yes, DO admire the efficiencies of Scale created by vast slave labor pools and unregulated discharge of cyanide, beryllium and lead into the local drinking water - Flint, Michigan IS the New Worker's Paradise! Continue your War Without End against all those Evil Terrorists, you know, the ones you keep arming, as Football and Sport don't provide NEARLY the distraction that constant Fear does. And Above all, keep them in FRONT OF THE SCREENS!!! Outraged and bored and chained to click-response, click-response...One Nation Under Borg, United We Slave...
Funny though
BTW "electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon" sounds scary until you learn about what it is and how it works. Apparently it takes a sizeable thermonuke detonation above the atmosphere, to take out mostly VHF comms over a limited but quite large geographical area, for a number of minutes. If that helps to block out most broadcast radio I would welcome it, frankly.
The concept was tested pretty thoroughly, there is a good documentation about it:
Difficult, the beast is in a polar orbit and neither the Americans or the Russians are set up to launch manned spacecraft to polar orbit.
However, it probably doesn't matter as the Americans (and probably the Russians too) have the capability of photographing the satellite from the ground and so, more than likely, have images of the satellite already.
http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-05-11
This is just so wrong.
I hope that they make sure no more toothpaste or antibiotics can be shipped into the country until this finally stops.
Why cant they be like the USA and just launch things like the X-37 to test how ketchup reacts in high orbit low gravity situations?.
Those North Koreans are so bad.
I bet they will be the first country in the world to ever use any form of atomic weapon. Those evil people need to be punished.
UN will "develop significant measures in a new Security Council resolution in response to the nuclear test" or in English, we will slap their hands and send to the naughty corner as we have no real influence in the country and rely on the USA to do our dirty work and then scream like a little girl when they don't like what the USA is doing !
The only sanctions that matter are from the Chinese. Without them North Korea can't survive. The problem for China is that now that they've allowed a nuclear power to grow in their shadow, they can't risk pissing them off too badly. I have to think that if they could get a do-over on the last few decades they would have taken a harder line with the Norks in the past to prevent them from becoming a nuclear power.
China has the ability to shoot down a handful of missiles coming from North Korea, but probably not one that is essentially dropped from space without warning (if that's what this "satellite" is or is the dry run for) Now they are as vulnerable as everyone else to North Korea, so they have even more reason to stay on their good side.
South Korea is who really needs to worry here. While a nuclear attack on South Korea by the Norks would quite possibly result in the US nuking Pyongyang and ending the problem for good, I wonder if the Norks leadership is cognizant of that? They seem to ascribe godlike powers to 'Dear Leader', they might believe he can protect them, and he might believe he's invulnerable.
Launch a missile. Claim it is a communication satellite (because connectivity with the far-flung NK empire and allies is critical) in order to play along with the charade of non-aggression. Make it silent, deliberately. Let your adversaries ponder the true purpose and implied capability.
Deterrence. Done.
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