Politics Hawaii Ballistic Missile Inbound Warning (NOT TRUE)

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BrianFromWA

BrianFromWA

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So, um, help me out here.

In one corner, there's a country's leader with unilateral ability to launch missile strikes. Who may or may not have capability to tip the ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads.

In the other, we have the US Government and our military chain of command, with all of its inherent checks and balances.

One leader has repeatedly violated world law to the point that sanctions have been placed upon his country by the UN.

Most of the twitter outrage today is for the President to stop talking tough b/c Hawaiians are scared, especially after a missile alert. But it seems to me that if NK was not allowed to have either an intercontinental ballistic missile program OR a nuclear program, they'd have nothing to worry about (except the Chinese, the Russians, anyone else who notices that the Entire Pacific Fleet, the world's most powerful Navy BY ITSELF, is HQ'd at Pearl).

Help me understand what I'm missing, which may be misinterpreting Rep. Gabbard.
 
Rep. Gabbard is a Democrat!

Rather conservative too. We could use a few more like this lady.
 
Ha!
Now that you mention it, I could use a little help with clarity too.
 
BrianFromWA said:
Most of the twitter outrage today is for the President to stop talking tough b/c Hawaiians are scared, especially after a missile alert. But it seems to me that if NK was not allowed to have either an intercontinental ballistic missile program OR a nuclear program, they'd have nothing to worry about (except the Chinese, the Russians, anyone else who notices that the Entire Pacific Fleet, the world's most powerful Navy BY ITSELF, is HQ'd at Pearl).

Help me understand what I'm missing, which may be misinterpreting Rep. Gabbard.
Click to expand...

I don't know what she was trying to say, but I'm not impressed with her generally.

As for NK, what do you propose to do about it, Brian?

barfo
 
barfo said:
I don't know what she was trying to say, but I'm not impressed with her generally.

As for NK, what do you propose to do about it, Brian?

barfo
Click to expand...
There are ways of removing the ability to craft nuclear warheads for non-nuclear states, especially those already under sanctions. Maybe the President doesn't want to use them, fine. I don't think "let them keep doing what they're doing" is a deterrent, but more a contributor to today's scare. Specifically, would any Hawaiians have batted an eye if NK's nuclear program (such as it is) and ballistic tests weren't in the news? I mean, if the people in Kansas got a tweet today saying "40' tsunami coming?" would their representatives panic, or laugh at someone's dumb mistake?

I'm also intrigued at how this went out to the entire populace of Hawaii without the PACOM watch floor being able to refute it. I promise our defense capability to detect incoming ballistic missiles is higher than the populace's, including media.
 
BrianFromWA said:
There are ways of removing the ability to craft nuclear warheads for non-nuclear states
Click to expand...

I would very much like to hear your approach, Brian. I have one but would rather hear yours. In my view, allowing then to continue and keep the threat
is a no go.
 
The big accomplishments of the previous ESTP Presidents.

TDR
With the help of Admiral Alfred Mahan, boosted the US fleet into becoming a world class Navy.

FDR
I have very little kind to say here, except the man in charge when WWII began.

LBJ
The implementer of the Tonkin Gulf incident and the greatest American fiasco in history.

DJT
Rejuvenated the US Navy and implementer of the South China Sea Islands strategy, including a resolution of the North Korean threat.
Results remain to be seen.
 
My favorite little daydream "solution" to N. Korea's nukes is to send fat boy a message saying that unless he gives up his program entirely, we're going to tell China that we'd rather have them as a neighbor to S. Korea than the current guys. Let him do the math.

Okay, there are probably a thousand reasons why that's a really bad idea, but it makes me chuckle.
 
Eisenhower once said, "God help us with a man of less experience than me gets in this office." We are playing nuclear musical chairs with a despot who will do anything not to end up like Muammar Gaddafi.
 
You know Kim Jong Un is laughing his ass off right now
 
I’m really lacking knowledge in this area so I just hope those in charge have a much better idea of what to do.

However, this seems like just the beginning to what will be a repeat problem over subsequent generations. As technology improves and weapon systems become both easier to build and easier to conceal this problem will multiply. Every nation state will be able to pose the same risk, and even terrorist groups will be able to build nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction with ease.

That’s one big reason I want the US to stop playing world cop. We might be able to succeed now, but we are placing ourselves in the crosshairs of demise down the road.

As I said, my knowledge in this area is limited so feel free to school me. I’m open to changing my mind.
 
I have around 20 friends of mine over in Hawaii working some golf tournaments. My facebook feed lit up with all there messages about this. They were freaked out for about 20 minutes.
 
Further said:
However, this seems like just the beginning to what will be a repeat problem over subsequent generations. As technology improves and weapon systems become both easier to build and easier to conceal this problem will multiply. Every nation state will be able to pose the same risk, and even terrorist groups will be able to build nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction with ease.
Click to expand...
Forget nuclear technology for a second, let's take stealth aviation. We flew the first stealth airplane 40 years ago. China and Russia only within the last few years have demonstrated one. We've already retired a class of them (the F-117s). No other country has even a prototype stealth fighter. Much less helicopter, one of which we canceled (the Comanche) and one inserted the SEALs who got Bin Laden. It's not trivial to build a) a ballistic missile program (the Scud, used heavily in the Iran/Iraq war in the 80's and the Gulf War, was a buy from Russia, b/c even with as much as Saddam was pumping into weaponry, it's hard to develop theater ballstic technology, to say nothing of accurate theater ballistic tech, to say nothing of accurate intercontinental ballistic tech), b) a nuclear program, which I have to give NK credit for--by all accounts they've been pumping almost every available won into doing so, and c) accurate targeting and guidance technology. Honestly, the drone problem is the closest one to what you're referencing, and even that is being handled in ways I can't get into.

That’s one big reason I want the US to stop playing world cop. We might be able to succeed now, but we are placing ourselves in the crosshairs of demise down the road.
Click to expand...
Someone has to, because there are messed-up people all over the world, doing messed-up things to people that would be an affront to anything called "civilization". If not us, who? I remind you, the UN has been trying for 60 years in some places to do so, and have been unable (maybe b/c the UN doesn't have access to classified programs). And I'd say that, even as crappy as our foreign policy has been or may be, where we've had extended presence (Japan, Korea, Germany/Western Europe) they have embraced both a representative democratic form of government and become highly-greased economic engines. Even in the newer areas (Afghanistan, Iraq) there are constitutions, some adherence to rules of law, etc. Not so where the UN has policed. You can say "I want US troops to stay home" and it's a very valid opinion. What that means is, "I don't care if someone who doesn't live here gets a raw deal, as long as I don't have to deal with it." :dunno:
 
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HCP said:
I have around 20 friends of mine over in Hawaii working some golf tournaments. My facebook feed lit up with all there messages about this. They were freaked out for about 20 minutes.
Click to expand...

Like I said earlier, only because we've allowed them to be. If the twitter had come out saying "huge deadly blizzard headed for Honolulu" they would've laughed and gone back to sleep. There's almost no way a) NK has a missile that has the range to hit Hawaii, b) NK has the ability to properly mate said missile capability with a nuclear warhead, and c) be anything close to accurate enough to hit in island 30 miles in diameter from 5000 miles away...but since NK's abilities have been hyped, nothing has been done about it and our country and its military leadership has been denigrated, your friends had a rough morning.
 
BrianFromWA said:
Like I said earlier, only because we've allowed them to be. If the twitter had come out saying "huge deadly blizzard headed for Honolulu" they would've laughed and gone back to sleep. There's almost no way a) NK has a missile that has the range to hit Hawaii, b) NK has the ability to properly mate said missile capability with a nuclear warhead, and c) be anything close to accurate enough to hit in island 30 miles in diameter from 5000 miles away...but since NK's abilities have been hyped, nothing has been done about it and our country and its military leadership has been denigrated, your friends had a rough morning.
Click to expand...

So who is helping NK with their missile program? Seems too many recent developments to have done it without outside help.
 
Not really....they've been working on it for almost 50 years. They got the original "peaceful" nuclear tech and support from both Russia and China in the 60s. Then in the 90s President Clinton gave them "peaceful" nuclear tech so that they'd stop their weapons program. Then they stole some of Pakistan's nuclear tech. Over the next decade they were able to develop nuclear bomb technology. Since 2006 they've been trying to mate them to missiles (making them lighter, more efficient, etc). We had a shot with the death of Kim Jong Il to do some, uh, eradication, but didn't. Over the last 5 years they've had at least 5 nuclear tests, in addition to all of the missile fire tests they've had over the last decade.

Allowing open proliferation of nuclear missile tech by countries without the gov't to responsibly handle them (and I'm kind of looking at Pakistan, too) leads to things like this morning. If we'd eradicated their ability to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles and disarmed their nuclear weapons program, today's tweet would've been a huge joke.
 
BrianFromWA said:
Someone has to, because there are messed-up people all over the world, doing messed-up things to people that would be an affront to anything called "civilization". If not us, who? I remind you, the UN has been trying for 60 years in some places to do so, and have been unable (maybe b/c the UN doesn't have access to classified programs). And I'd say that, even as crappy as our foreign policy has been or may be, where we've had extended presence (Japan, Korea, Germany/Western Europe) they have embraced both a representative democratic form of government and become highly-greased economic engines. Even in the newer areas (Afghanistan, Iraq) there are constitutions, some adherence to rules of law, etc. Not so where the UN has policed. You can say "I want US troops to stay home" and it's a very valid opinion. What that means is, "I don't care if someone who doesn't live here gets a raw deal, as long as I don't have to deal with it." :dunno:
Click to expand...
Some great points and it's something I struggle with. I fully acknowledge that there are some terrible plights in the world and some, even most can be corrected to some great degree through US intervention. At least, I hope that's the case. But the burden is great to be the ones to correct worldwide injustices. We select some nations to help while we let other situations fester. Why, well because the ones we insert ourselves into are most likely to affect us in some way, financially, politically or militarily. But what happens over time? In many cases our insertion into foreign conflicts produces unstable governments and militia forces that are able to capitalize on the perception of that the US is an unclean actor. So as propped up governments fail, they are often replaced by forces that despise the US. As we do move closer to easier production of weapons of mass destruction, I think it behooves us to have as few enemies worldwide as possible.

It's certainly not always our choice who is or is not our enemy, but we have definitely done a few things over the years to further the likelihood that some terrorist nations and/or governments will consider us the enemy. I don't know how to strike a balance, but moving away from military-style conflicts seems like a prudent step. Of course, not in all cases, but I would like to move in that direction. And all of that is without even looking at the financial implications of playing world cop. And then there is the human toll. There are some great things that come from the Military too, like we educated and highly motivated professionals who learned their skills in the military. And there are tons of communities that have been built up and put onto self sustaining pathways through the leadership of our military. I guess there are just many plusses and minuses and I'm just not convinced that we shouldn't start pairing back our role as world cop.
 
MarAzul said:
DJT
Rejuvenated the US Navy and implementer of the South China Sea Islands strategy, including a resolution of the North Korean threat.
Results remain to be seen.
Click to expand...

WTF? Rejuvenated how? BrianFromWA, do you think the navy is rejuvenated?

How is the NK threat resolved?

If anything, the Navy has had an unusually large number of fuckups on Trump's watch (I don't blame Trump for those - but I don't see evidence of rejuvenation either).

barfo
 
Oh, and by the way, although I don't know much about the nuclear programs or any other weapon systems, I do have a bit of inside knowledge on one particular biological threat simply because I used to work on it in a laboratory setting. I had nothing to do with weaponizing the agent, but we were studying it simply because it mimicked a different disease pathway that we were interested in. Anyways, I know that this particular biological agent is extremely easy to produce and weaponization would be relatively easy, at least on the scale of targeting 10'000's of thousands of citizens. scaling up from that would be difficult. My point is that there are a myriad of weapons that we need to worry about and nuclear is but one. And technology will help some more than others, but it's disingenuous to suggest that over the coming decades these weapons won't be much easier to produce by fewer people with less resources. Some may take much longer, but whatever weapons (most likely biological) prove to be the easiest to produce will become the ones we have to worry about the soonest.
 
barfo said:
WTF? Rejuvenated how? BrianFromWA, do you think the navy is rejuvenated?
Click to expand...
No. I think that his plans, if they come to fruition, would do wonders. Having 350 ships instead of 270 would be mammoth and would alleviate some of the root causes of the fuckups you talk about (optempo too high for skilled and trained sailors, leadership worried about saying "no" to civilians, etc.) by sheer sharing of responsibility.

I think that, by-and-large anecdotally, sailors and officers are happier with someone who'll "talk tough and be tougher" with bad people around the world than those who appease, but the military generally runs conservative so it's not a surprise that there's "rejuvenation".
 
Further said:
Oh, and by the way, although I don't know much about the nuclear programs or any other weapon systems, I do have a bit of inside knowledge on one particular biological threat simply because I used to work on it in a laboratory setting. I had nothing to do with weaponizing the agent, but we were studying it simply because it mimicked a different disease pathway that we were interested in. Anyways, I know that this particular biological agent is extremely easy to produce and weaponization would be relatively easy, at least on the scale of targeting 10'000's of thousands of citizens. scaling up from that would be difficult. My point is that there are a myriad of weapons that we need to worry about and nuclear is but one. And technology will help some more than others, but it's disingenuous to suggest that over the coming decades these weapons won't be much easier to produce by fewer people with less resources. Some may take much longer, but whatever weapons (most likely biological) prove to be the easiest to produce will become the ones we have to worry about the soonest.
Click to expand...
Biological weaponry is generally off the table for nation-states b/c of the Geneva Protocol. Aside from that, it's hard to weaponize other than in a "terrorist"-type scenario (London and Tokyo subways, for instance). Missile delivery is pretty hard for bio (and even some chem) agents.

B/c it's against the Geneva Protocol, b/c we have reciprocity with nuclear weapons for any chem or bio or nuclear attack, and b/c we'd be fully justified, I don't expect that anyone should be surprised when someone is annihilated if bio agents are used against us.
 
barfo said:
WTF? Rejuvenated how? BrianFromWA, do you think the navy is rejuvenated?

How is the NK threat resolved?

If anything, the Navy has had an unusually large number of fuckups on Trump's watch (I don't blame Trump for those - but I don't see evidence of rejuvenation either).

barfo
Click to expand...

Patience. :twothumbs:
 
Amazing that we can go to war with Iran over WMDs that never existed and NOT go to war with NK when we know they DO!
 
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