The People’s Republic of China says it has ordered businesses doing business with northern Korean entities or individuals must shut down within 120 days.
This would be cool, if it happens. The PRC has said it would enforce other sanctions, also, and then only paid lip service to enforcement while engaging in business largely as usual with the north.
Believe it when you see it actually happen. If it does happen, believe the durability of PRC enforcement when it actually lasts.
Ri Yong Ho, northern Korea’s Foreign Minister and spokesman for Baby Kim, appears to have let the cat out of the bag. Responding to President Donald Trump’s series of remarks about northern Korea and Baby Kim during the week, Ri said
He [Trump] committed an irreversible mistake of making our rockets’ visit to the entire US mainland inevitable all the more[.]
Notice that. Ri isn’t only responding to Trump’s current position. All the more is the key phrase here. Northern Korea’s intent all along, its motivation for developing nuclear weapons and delivery systems, has been to attack us; otherwise, there is nothing than which to be all the more.
Just like Iran vis-à-vis Israel.
Germany has been struck by a wave of hackers from the People’s Republic of China as the PRC moves to steal from cutting-edge manufacturers.
The German government
is now moving to shield companies from state-backed hackers and criminal gangs, offering to pay to harden the defenses of Germany’s most vulnerable firms.
This is a start, but it’s insufficient.
Hacks like this, originating as they do from a fundamentally autocratic nation, can only be taken as state-sanctioned, if not outright -directed, as such they are overt acts of aggression, and so they require commensurately serious responses.
Germany—and the US where we’re hacked against—need to engage in sterner, more concrete responses to the PRC’s hacks. Such responses should include sanctions against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies that range from punitive tariffs to barring those companies from doing business in Germany or the US to blocking their access to deutschmarks and dollars. Further responses should include cyber attacks against PRC companies in the same or similar industries as the hacked companies with goals ranging from temporarily blocking their operations to permanently damaging them.
And of communications, air conditioning in hot and humid environs (and of heating in cold environs), food and water distribution, fuel supplies, and so on.
Block by block and city by city, utilities face one of the largest power restoration challenges in US history as they bring back electricity to more than 15 million people affected by Hurricane Irma.
Almost 60,000 utility workers from the US and Canada are descending on Florida and other states hard hit by the storm, with more line crews and contractors expected soon….
The Wall Street Journal article from which the above quote was taken was strictly about the subject of that quote. However, there’s a much larger lesson, of much broader national security—even survival—implication, that Irma (and Harvey) would teach, were we willing to listen. The lesson needs to be learned widely, too, from individual citizens to government at all levels.
That lesson is the outcome of an EMP strike or strikes, which would drop our power grid, producing all of those follow-on failures even more thoroughly and over the entire nation. Such a strike is the sort of thing Russia actively tested when it was the core of the USSR, a capability possessed by the People’s Republic of China, and something northern Korea has been threatening us with since they successfully tested an ICBM. We got a taste of this from the Northeast Blackout of 1965, and that wasn’t even from an EMP, just an “ordinary” failure that cascaded. These hurricanes should finally prompt us to take action.
Some estimates, possibly apocryphal, but maybe not, have 90% of the American population dying in the immediate and near-term aftermath of a suitably timed EMP attack. The collateral damage would hit Canada and Mexico, too, limiting their ability to help us as they would need to see to their own survival first—as Mexico has had to do with its withdrawal of an offer of aid to Texas in the face of its own back-to-back devastating earthquake off its West Coast and hurricane coming ashore on its East Coast.
The necessary lessons involve individual preparation: non-perishable food and water supplies, alternative power sources or thought-out plans for doing without power (Florida Power and Light and Duke Energy are estimating nearly a week to restore power to “most” customers in one area and 10 days or more to customers in another area), neighborhood plans for security and first aid patrol until legitimate authority can arrive (days or weeks later in the case of an EMP attack, at least days later as the hurricanes are demonstrating). At the corporate level, the lessons include hardening facilities against EMP attack (a stretch, with Equifax demonstrating that corporations too often can’t be bothered with hardening against hacks) and provisioning alternate power sources. Government lessons begin with restoring security and medical services promptly; restoring power/facilitating utilities’ efforts to restore power; and food, water, and fuel distribution. At the national level, this includes hardening our power grid against EMP attack and ensuring continuity of communications with the population and with our defense establishment.
And that’s just for starters.
Senator Diane Feinstein (D, CA) wrote a letter to the editor of USA Today that’s breathtaking in the sweep of its ignorance.
Should the United States adopt a policy of no first use, making clear to the world that our country will never launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike? The answer is yes.
The answer is, of course, No. She began that question with a false premise. No first use is not limited to a preemptive nuclear strike. It simply means no first use. We engaged in first use when we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki (apart from the narrow tautology that we were the only nation with nuclear weapons), and contra Feinstein’s disparagement of the use and its casualties, that use ended the war, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of American, Allied, and Japanese soldiers and the lives of millions of Japanese civilians.
That question contains a second false premise: that preemption is necessarily bad. Not at all. When the enemy has demonstrated his irrevocable intent to attack, preemption is a moral imperative. If the only means available to fruitful preemption is nuclear-armed missiles, they must be employed.
Committing to a policy of no first use would help keep us safe by minimizing the very real risk that a foreign power—like North Korea—might misinterpret a benign rocket launch or a non-nuclear military action….
This is just nonsense. With modern sensing and communications capabilities—even that possessed by northern Korea, misinterpretation is not going to occur. Action might well be deliberately misinterpreted, but that’s independent of anything we might do.
Beyond that, first use, especially of tactical nuclear weapons, may be the only way to prevent a conventional war defeat, which defeat would be every bit as devastating to our national security, even our independence.
There’s no such thing as a limited nuclear war….
Of course there is, and the Soviet Union actively trained for it. Today, Russia and the People’s Republic of China are actively training for it.
RTWT—it’s not that long. Which makes the breadth of ignorance such an accomplishment.