Tuesday, April 18, 2017

How Did North Korea Build Up A Massive Military Stockpile?

Chinese made military vehicles carry missiles with characters reading "Pukkuksong" during a military parade CREDIT: REUTERS

News.com.au: How the hell has North Korea managed to build a massive military stockpile?

FROM the outside North Korea looks like an impoverished state cut off from the rest of the world.

But during its weekend procession, the isolated regime managed to put on an impressive display of its rockets and military strength, in defiance of growing American warnings about its military capability.

While many have the impression of North Korea being a poor country that can’t feed its own people, Leonid Petrov told news.com.au that it had large stockpiles of natural resources that it used to fund its weapons research.

“North Korea is a mountainous country that has huge natural resources including deposits of high quality coal, gold, silver, uranium, iron ore and rare earth metals,” said Dr Petrov, a visiting fellow at the Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific.

He said North Korea had exported its minerals to allies such as China and the Soviet Union for decades until the collapse of the communist bloc.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: North Korea's has business ties with scores of countries .... and this in turn has helped North Korea to gain the monies and resources necessary to build up its military and necessary stockpiles. Case in point .... Beijing forced to defend trade with North Korea after Chinese-made truck used to showcase missiles (The Telegraph).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's so many statements saying that the big danger could be that the North Koreans miscalculate Americans resolve. Fair enough.
But I think the bigger danger (to the West) is that we miscalculate what North Korea is capable of - and who's helping them. Let's face it. China has been helping North Korea all along to get to this stage and has done little to nothing but words to stop them, while increasing trade with them. Why? Why does China benefit from North Korea having nuclear weapons and why do we have to twist China's arm to stop it? Because they don't want it to stop. They want north Korea to attack the US. Sure. .a war on its borders would be a nuisance, but over the 2-3 decades it will take to clean up the mess and move in their own people it's nothing more than a small nuisance and might actually be good for them. So why does China want it? Because they can have a third party attack the US. Only one nuclear device has to be exploded on US soil, likely west coast, to end the question about who will dominate this century. China has everything to win and little to lose.
I would really put my money on that China has been moving the puppet Kim for years and probably his dad too. Does anyone really believe that multi-trillion dollar sized china with a billion plus people - north Korea's neighbour - has not infiltrated them? This is chess (or "go"). We always say China is acting smart and playing the long game - but when it comes to North Korea we tend to believe the media BS that they can't do much about North Korea. Really. ...wake up..if you've ever been to China you won't believe that for a second.

Anonymous said...

What would it look like?

North Korea fires off a missile and the US fails to intercept.
Missile explodes over US west coast, SF bay area. Immediate loss of several hundred thousand of lives, and a few TRILLION US dollars, and ten times worth more in inventions, brain power (that would have fruited in economic reality a few years from then if they wouldn't have exploded into fine powdered ash)..

The US retaliates. Kim's last press statement will be "I did not order firing that missile, I don't know what's going on.." followed by melting cameras.

It doesn't have to be Kim who wants to fire that missile. It doesn't have to be miscalculation on his part. My bet is that he's a puppet of China for years now. China absolutely controls and tries to control every country and region surrounding it. And North Korea surely is part of it.

Kim's regime is technologically and educationally not up to par with China. Not by a long long shot. They wouldn't even know if some tech made it into their missile program that only China controls. This is what makes this so dangerous.

We might be into a shooting war with an enemy we know little of, and we might hit back at a country not even worth nuking (from an economical point of view.. they wipe out trillions and trillions with a SF bay attack and in return we wipe out a couple billions on their side.. it's a 1:1000 or worse ratio).. this is so dangerous to the West and we have to stop underestimating what is going on here. Especially as our intel sucks.
Meanwhile, the US is just now (in May) testing if they could shoot down one of North Korea's missiles if it were to be launched. Means now we don't even know. How the f did 10 years of North Korea advances go by and we sit here with nothing to show for and not knowing what's going on?

We are terrible at geopolitical chess. And our opponents/adversaries (Iran, Russia, China) are so much better - or at least that's how the story always goes, right?

Something does not smell right here, and if a shooting war breaks out, I hope the US knows who they need to aim at.