United States Begins Flying Stealth Bombers Over South Korea

skade88 writes "The New York Times is reporting that the United States has started flying B-2 stealth bomber runs over South Korea as a show of force to North Korea. The bombers flew 6,500 miles to bomb a South Korean island with mock explosives. Earlier this month the U.S. Military ran mock B-52 bombing runs over the same South Korean island. The U.S. military says it shows that it can execute precision bombing runs at will with little notice needed. The U.S. also reaffirmed their commitment to protecting its allies in the region. The North Koreans have been making threats to turn South Korea into a sea of fire. North Korea has also made threats claiming they will nuke the United States' mainland."

Re:Good luck with that

[mrchew1982]

Who do you think the stealth bomber runs are done to impress? CHINA!!! Sure, Kim Jong Un might know about them and use them as propaganda, and it might scare him a little that he can't see the things on radar, but my guess is that we're really trying to impress China. I'm sure that the island is right at the edge of their early warning radar coverage, and if we slip in and drop the payload without raising an alarm (with a bomber that we designed in the 70's no less...) China will sit up and take notice. The Chinese are the only ones in a position to twist Kim's arm hard enough to make him stop acting like a four-year-old, the Chinese are the ones that we are trying to scare.

Re:The winner?

[phantomfive]

FWIW North Korea tends to get more and more aggressive until there is a response. If this doesn't work, they'll start shelling an island, or try to sink a ship. Better to send them a message before they get too crazy.

The response here is probably a good one. Fly a few planes around. It serves little military purpose to let your enemy know you've been doing practice bombing runs. But it's a decent way to send a message to North Korea, "stop being annoying."

Re:The winner?

[bragr]

France and England gave Germany a lot of slack in the lead up to WW2. Europe suffered so many casualties in WWI that it decimated a generation and made most countries in Europe very war shy. Consequently, when Germany began openly flaunting the restrictions that had been place on it after WWI in the Treaty of Versailles, making demands, and annexing other countries, France and England compromised, made concessions, and offered little real resistance besides formal protest. They hoped by appeasing Hitler, they could diffuse the situation and avoid another full scale war, which worked well obviously because only 60 or 70 million people died during WW2.

Re:The winner?

[mooingyak]

Some pretty minimal googling [google.com] could have answered that for you.

The excerpt from the first link that google shows:

Discover how the policy of Appeasement, championed by Neville Chamberlain and the League of Nations inevitably led to WW2.

Re:Perfect Analogy

[ScentCone]

None of their recent threats have been at South Korea

Other than the part where they talk about turning SK into a "sea of fire" and about "raining bullets on them" etc. Have you not been paying attention?

Re:The winner?

[murdocj]

In case you haven't noticed, the USA is at war with North Korea. There was never a peace treaty, and NK has exited the armistice agreement. This has zero to do with dick waving and lots to do with trying to save a lot of lives.

Re:Good luck with that

[tftp]

They test every ship with a geiger counter. The containers with the nuke would be found very quickly.

Uranium-based nukes are not sufficiently radioactive for that. The metal itself is a weak alpha emitter. That alone can be blocked with a mere sheet of paper. But the bomb is enclosed in a metal casing that absorbs pretty much everything. Given the size of the bomb and the size of the available volume for concealment, you could even shield a gamma emitter with enough lead, and nobody would know.

To further complicate your inspection job, container ships are loaded so much [wordpress.com] that you cannot even access containers inside the stack until the ship is at the pier and cranes are working on it, layer by layer. By then it's kind of too late. You could try inspections at the port of origin, but that is hard - you have no rights there, on the foreign soil, and the locals are in charge. You can approve one container, but a completely different one gets loaded.

Re:The winner?

[Martin Blank]

South Korea is at war with North Korea. The US never declared war on North Korea. It took part in a UN-sanctioned action to defend South Korea.

Re:Good luck with that

[cusco]

Put it in the middle of a container of LCD screens, they're made with leaded glass. Bury it in a shipment of cat litter, which is already radioactive. For that matter, just wrap the thing in a foot of solid lead.

When did they start scanning ships before docking? The last I heard they were still trying to get the machines that scan the individual containers to work correctly, without a lot of success.

Re:Good luck with that

[MrEdofCourse]

North Korea has 70 submarines (the US has 71):
http://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail.asp?country_id=North-Korea [globalfirepower.com]

I'm wondering if we're tracking all of them, or even able to track them. Sure, they're probably old and what not, but if we're not tracking them, one could be sent into a port... unless we have some kind of submarine fence/detection system?

Still, an undetected sub could leave North Korea with a nuke and then hijack a cargo ship from a US friendly country, transferring the nuke to the ship.

Re:WW2

[Luckyo]

That's not quite correct. While there was no direct collision course, Stalin's politics actually put USSR firmly on everyone's map as a rising giant. It's very difficult to deny that Stalin's policies weren't the main drive behind the massive rise of USSR from post-civil war ruined country to an industrial and agrarian powerhouse over just a few years. The main reason why it wasn't as scary as it was after the war was that fascist Germany was rising from similar situation even faster.

For example, did you know that at the same time as "USSR's bread basket" Ukraine suffered from holodomor, the hunger that killed millions, USSR was exporting millions of tons of grain? Stalin judged that dead ukrainians were worth the fund injection he used to build up the industrial base of USSR.

Re:The winner?

[KGIII]

He has a valid point and his theory has been postulated (and is commonly accepted) by people who are experts in the field. That whole point was the difference between Neville Chamberlain (spelling, too lazy to look it up) and Winston Churchill for instance. Your response makes me curious...

See, the PM of the UK at the time was Neville Chamberlain and his nickname actually was "The Great Appeaser."

I don't mean this as an insult and I was once of a similar mind. But, I'm going to guess that you have been restricted (willfully or culturally) to an Americanized history of WWII. Read (or watch) about the events of the 1930s in western and central Europe. France and England stood by and LET Hitler take what he wanted with Chamberlain signing non-aggression pacts and getting autographed night stand pictures of Hitler all because of the sour taste that WWI left in the mouths of Europeans. I'll chalk it up to American education (left over from the Cold War) and not hold it against you all that much.

You probably also think that America won the war in Europe and that Japan surrendered because we nuked them. Hint: You can thank the Russians, probably for both. The Russians threw tens of millions of people at Hitler (defeating the Germans) and then crossed the boarder and beat the snot out of the Japanese in Manchuria around the same time we nuked 'em. The latter isn't known for certain and is still debated but there's a lot of evidence for it being as much, if not more, a catalyst than us having dropped a nuke on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Did America help in Europe? Absolutely and we funded and supported a great deal of it. Europe would have had a difficult time without American help, money, and equipment. The same applies in North Africa and in Italy. American Marines did the majority of work in the Pacific with the help of the locals, UK, NZ, and AUS but the Japanese were scared shitless of the Russians who threw something insane like 24,000,000 people in the European theater alone.

My memory is a bit fuzzy and some of the numbers or names may be a bit off but I doubt I got anything too far off. However, the person's post was spot on for the most part and what they propose isn't even really subject to debate with most folks though I'm sure you could get find someone who disagreed though I'd have to see some extraordinary evidence and reasoning. If you have some other facts that the experts don't know about then I'd be interested in hearing about them. I'm not an expert nor do I have a degree in the subject, I'm just a rather passionate fan of certain areas of our history and I consider learning about those periods to be a hobby.

To show you that I really don't mean this as an insult I went and did a quick Google for just the terms "wwii appeasement" and found this as a handy link:

http://www.history.co.uk/explore-history/ww2/appeasement.html [history.co.uk]

I'd recommend just a few of the more recent documentaries or World at War if you can find it. The Military Channel has a bunch that are worth watching. It is a subject I really enjoy so if you have anything to support your statements I'm definitely interested in it.