So when they did this in 2006, the UN issued weapons sanctions against North Korea[1]. Then when they did it again in 2009, the UN issued more sanctions[2] that apparently NK considered an 'act of war'. From them, the world has intercepted a whopping 6 North Korean boats and 1 North Korean airplane.
Aside from "issuing even more sanctions" what options are available to the UN? Good luck trying to send in a team of people to destroy the nuclear program, that will all but invite a warhead/attack.
For decades that's been the problem. South Korea's population centers are too close to the North for an attack to be a reasonable risk: even decades-old artillery and unguided rockets can hit Seoul, launched from hundreds of dug-in sites. So things have been organized around trying to pressure North Korea in various ways, either via China, or directly, but without force being a seriously considered option.
Never ever underestimate the power of being self sufficient military wise. You can pretty much do anything you want and get away if you are a nuclear power. And its not like North Korea is going to remain poor forever.
Look at UAE and Singapore, it takes little time to change the economic situation. A little years here and there, with China's and India's emergence on the world scene things can change pretty rapidly. To cut US's influence in Asia, North Korea is a indispensable asset.
Allies are not permanent and US's help to Japan and South Korea is not infinite. Geopolitical situations will always change and have always changed throughout history.
Given this situation, North Korea can be a big player in the future, now imagine having the military might in this situation. It can force unification of the Korean peninsula on its terms in the future.
> And its not like North Korea is going to remain poor forever.
They are doing a pretty good job of being poor already. I don't think you can compare North Korea to those other countries, even China. North Korea is a world peculiarity; it is the way it is because of it's bizarre regime, in a way different from China. It is so totally isolated and the average person is so uninformed about what is happening less than 100 miles from it's borders. The kind of trade that would reduce North Korea's poverty, I think would topple the regime, a regime based on magical stories about unicorns and people that don't need to use the bathroom.
NK argues that their regime is superior to all other regimes and prosperity would come any day now. Therefore asking for humanitarian aid would contradict their propaganda. On the other hand, as long as they are the worst of the bad, they have natural allies, like Iran, Myanmar and any other 'bad guy of the week.' In addition they can realistically only sell ballistic missiles and nuclear technology, since they do not produce much interesting stuff besides WMDs.
So the NK government has the choice between pushing nuclear technology and missiles, which kind of works in the short run, or they can throw all their previous work in this areas away to start a rather complicated transition to a more long term strategy. Depending on how stable the regime is, it may survive the short term problems such a change of strategy creates.
The longer historical context is that in the 90's the PRNK agreed to hand over their future nuclear power infrastructure to us, in exchange for abandoning a weapons program. Domestic political winds shifted, and the USA chose not to honor the agreement by congress strangling funds. Instead we paid them oil as a substitute. Things broke down further in the Bush 'axis of evil' period.
PRNK's behavior right now seems to be about pushing the USA back to something like the prior agreement, likely because they see the Obama administration as more open to this possibility. Honestly this would probably be a win for everyone, particularly if it included opening up a labor trade between north and south Korea. North Korea is impoverished, but their citizenry is actually quite well educated (if indoctrinated). If economic sanctions were weakened, there's little question that access to north Korean labor would be in high demand globally. There are a lot of challenges to making this happen. Possibly the hardest are social, and will simply take the passing of generations to ease.
There are also probably important PRC PRNK relationship dimensions to all this as well, of which I'm ignorant.
It really comes down to the country's leadership. All of the other points in other comments here are certainly valid, but he feels that NK's leaders are more likely to be willing to push the button and the US is in range.
What I can't say is if this belief in NK's leaders is based on actual intelligence or some sort or just his opinion. Given their willingness to take pot-shots at SK, I know I'm concerned about this.
His view hasn't. My reading of it is that is because Kim Jong-un was raised in the same megalomaniac environment and the supporting power structure hasn't changed.
Because the regime has always been crazy, even as it passes through different rulers. The best case scenario of North Korea is that the world is faced with a humanitarian crises on a shocking scale that will cost tens of billions of dollars to correct. The expected lower limit of the results of foreign action working to take down the North Korean regime would be the deaths of hundreds of thousands or millions of South Korean civilians (in a matter of hours) due to shelling from thousands of DPRK artillery positions. The possible upper limit of badness would be the North Koreans hitting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Taipei, Tokyo, and Seoul with nuclear and/or chemical weapons on ICBMs, IRBMs, aircraft, or smuggled onto commercial cargo ships.
If I recall correctly, the list was unordered. But practically speaking, it was obvious that Iraq was the easiest target to attack, and North Korea would have been the most difficult. That has nothing to do with perceived evilness, though.
N Korea can NOT flatten Seoul in a few moments' notice because of the following:
1) Seoul is a HUGE city.
2) N Korea actually doesn't have UNlimited number of artillery tubes capable of reaching Seoul. There are hundreds (maybe a few thousand) tubes but these are heavy ones, meaning they would be lucky to get off a shot every few minutes. And they would have to be concentrated in a relatively small area near DMZ to reach Seoul, not smart move considering SKorea/US's jets.
3) You can BEN SKorea/US jets/artillery are already targeted for some/many of the known N Korean artillery sites.
4) N Korea's most interested in preserving status quo for their leaders and the elites that support the top leaders. Flattening Seoul would certainly mean they would be eliminated.
Yes N Korea can damage Seoul, but will not really 'flatten' it. Well, I hope...
There are some very detailed writeups of PRNK's ability to damage Seoul based on open sources around on the web. The short summary is that 'flatten in a few moments' may be an exaggeration, but they do present a very real and very large threat.
They do have a fair number of dug in artillery installations that could survive several airstrikes. The basic template of these installations are bunkers under mountaintops that artillery can move rapidly in and out of. So instead of shoot and scoot more like shoot and turtle up. They may have limited resources, but the PRNK does appear to know how to deploy them quite effectively. Chemical shelling is a particular concern.
It's not that the PRNK would win an outright war, it's that they could extract a massacre no one else wants.
The op was referring to "flatten" in terms of using a nuclear weapon not conventional artillery. Regardless, I think either way is so improbable it probably isn't even worth speculating about.
Neither is NK. They could wreak some havok with conventional weapons, but their last two nuclear tests were 1 & 2 kt, respectively. That's enough to take out a couple city blocks, with a fireball about 100 ft across. Couple that with the fact they can barely get a missile to go into the sky without blowing up, let alone land where they want it to, and NK's nuclear threat is pretty minimal. They'd cause far more damage with conventional weaponry.
Look into how much artillery they can bring to bear on Seoul (they have the world's largest artillery force, and Seoul is only 35 miles from the border).
Current best estimate is about 10,000 artillery shells per minute, landing in heavily populated parts of Seoul. How long that takes to match and then exceed the death counts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an experiment which hopefully will never be carried out.
Interesting logic. The government is willing to go to war to obstruct Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, yet not when North Korea is actually testing and threatening to "target" the U.S.:
I think you answered your own question. It's a lot easier to prevent a country from developing nuclear weapons that it is to confront one that already has them.
Also, different countries and different geopolitical situations. Iran has a few allies among the superpowers (Russia, China), but they aren't very strong allies. NK has pretty strong backing by the Chinese and the US also has to deal with it's allies in Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc.
It's much easier to play hardball with a country when no one is really opposed to you doing so.
I think there is also the issue that Iran is more likely to fight asymmetrically than North Korea would. I imagine that North Korea has all their nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles. Iran on the other hand probably support an asymmetrical war where nuclear weapons are brought into the country by "stateless" terrorists and then deny involvement.
I would also venture that Iran, being a "non-secular" government where the more fundamentalist members see US influence as a threat to their religion and way of life, is more likely to foster radicalists that would try to enter the US with a suitcase bomb. North Korea has completely isolated itself and its people from US influence. Iran on the other hand has "porous" borders that permit western media and western culture to permeate. The permeation of western culture is seen by some as a threat to be stopped.
Edit: can the downvoter, please explain their down vote?
Right, but that's pretty standard. This is a strategy that has existed since, well, before I was born. Nuclear weapons give you a seat at the grown-ups table. It isn't ideal, but it works. North Korea isn't the fear, nor really is the Iranian government. The fear is Iran will leak a weapon to fanatics that are not part of the Mutually Assured Destruction paradigm. That's problematic. There is some old saying about this, but I only vaguely remember it. It was something like You don't fear a country with 10,000 nuclear missiles you fear the lunatic with the small suitcase bomb.
If Paris/London/Berlin were somehow within 30 miles of Iran's border, nobody would think about going to war with Iran so easily. If any major city of western allies was a few dozen miles from Iraq, nobody would've gone to war with Iraq.
Yes, S Korea's not very lucky in the geography department. Actually the whole Korean peninsula.
The US had a brigade of soldiers stationed in West Berlin whose survival time was ~72 hours in the event of hostilities with the Soviets.
We almost went to war multiple times over things like geese flying over radars. Both the US and Soviets played little games like parking ballistic missiles in Turkey and Cuba to measure the reaction.
Iran has the ability to control the Straight of Hormuz. Iraq had the ability to harass shipping traffic in the Gulf. That waterway is far more important to the US (and Japan, and to a lesser extent, China) than Paris, London and Berlin.
A big difference is that PRNK's provocations are mostly about preserving sovereignty and extracting material aid. PRNK is willing to use asymmetric tactics to their advantage, but so far this has been restricted to amassing weapons that threaten the southern population, and increasingly japan. They may be a batty and inhuman place, but their strategic behavior is largely rational self interest. PRNK wants nukes to hold as a trump threat, to then extract a rent.
Iran on the other hand has a much smaller military than PRNK, but is very active in supporting paramilitary groups (aka terrorists, insurgents) that are aligned with their interests. The fear is, they want a nuke not to hold onto, but to give away.
So aside from any domestic political considerations (read as: Israeli lobby groups), the strategic contexts are different in important ways.
It's mostly because we're in a bit of a bind as far as NK is concerned. As long as China supports/props them up we can't realistically 'attack' NK. Once China drops support for them you can bet that the regime will fall quickly, and/or China will smack them down before we even get the chance.
Iran is not a client state of China, though. Few people in the Chinese leadership want a nuclear war with the US, or with anybody else. They will keep Kim Jong Un on a short leash; we in the US can take our eye off of that particular ball.
Most informative piece on North Korean culture I've read recently was written by someone who worked in Pyongyang for a year as a "reviser" (giving a final read over their English translated press releases):
This is sad. Nuclear proliferation can be a good thing (energy), but it can also be a bad thing (weapons). NK only does this to get attention from other nations and feel like they are on the same level as them. The end result is food aid to stop the nuclear development. What's really sad is the world produces enough food to feed the entire population of the world, but most of it gets thrown away. I'm willing to pay twice as much for my food if it means the rest of the world gets to eat too, but I fear most people just don't care.
The good news, if you could call it that, is that China doesn't want American troops stationed on it's south border, so they will do what they can to keep NK in line.
These kinds of "you guys can't have nukes because they're bad, but we'll keep some on hand because we're responsible" disputes that the USA seems to love force me think "where are all the adults?"
This kind of thinking is disappointing. North Korea is a dictatorship that is irrational enough to starve it's citizens- if it has that little care for it's people, why wouldn't it launch some nukes?
Is the US perfect? No. Is it a democratic, accountable country? Largely, yes. There is no perfect system of government, and people should stop pretending that everyone is on the same moral level.
Some nations having nukes stops industrial scale war. There is no way to go to before there were nukes... it's necessary for enough of the power players to have control of them but not all of the players.
The adults are the non-nationalist people who see the world as a global community. These people are rare in politics it seems.
The adults are in the not in North Korea; I assure you. It is all well and fun the cry some sort of hypocrisy fall very weak to me. If you think the U.S. is bad, you're going to love North Korea.
I think it should be pointed out here that the NK regime is not actually crazy, they simply are very skilled at acting in such a way to extract concessions and aid to keep the regime intact.
I agree NK has some human rights issues, that should be addressed, but testing nuclear weapons is no different to Pakistan or India, and there are no sanctions against them.
Are you kidding me? The DPRK is one of the most horrific regimes in the last 2 centuries, and that includes the Nazis and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Of all the regimes that can't be trusted with nuclear weapons they are pretty much at the top of the list.
The USA has nuclear weapons in South Korea, and they are the only country to actually use them. If they withdrew then maybe the two Koreas could negotiate peace.
WARNING: in this post I am going to be an "asshole", I make no apologies.
I am going to make this bold prediction: you are utterly ignorant of North Korean history, even in broad strokes. And this has allowed you to form utterly irrational and indeed insane opinions of that country.
Please stop commenting about the subject until you correct your ignorance.
Or do you wish to challenge my assumptions by producing extensive evidence that you are actually in fact supremely well informed about the North Korean regime and its history?
I don't know what point you're trying to make here but it's lost on me. Are you trying to imply that it's a good idea for North Korea to have nuclear weapons? That it avoids misery in some way? That's pathological.
Go read my other posts in this thread. If I had one wish it would be that the DPRK regime would step down so that the rest of the world would have the "opportunity" to dig the North Korean people out of the positively savage hell-hole they are living in right now. The best case scenario is that that happens and then it costs tens of billions of dollars to fix North Korea and put them on a level of, oh, say Yemen or Bangladesh, let alone South Korea. For that I'll be happy to see an increase in my taxes.
In the meantime millions of North Korean citizens are living in a stalinist police state, many of them a hair's breadth away from conditions of starvation. Oh, and their country is under the tyranny of a megalomaniac who is happy to continue the traditions of squandering his nation's few resources to build weapons to terrorize the rest of the world (to add to the long list of efforts in the same vein using everything from terrorism, such as when they downed Korean Air Flight 858, to espionage to exporting missile technology) rather than try to dig his country out of brutal, crushing poverty.
If there was a way to get rid of the North Korean regime without causing millions of civilian deaths on the Korean peninsula I'd probably be supportive of it, even if it meant an otherwise horrifying number of civilian deaths. Every year an unknown number of North Koreans are killed by the regime, perhaps as many as tens of thousands. Some estimates are that as many as 1.5 million North Koreans were killed in gulags during Kim Il Sung's reign. This is one of those rare cases where bringing up the Nazis and Hitler does not "Godwinize" the thread and is instead a fully apt and sobering point of comparison. A holocaust of North Koreans has happened, and the only reason it hasn't received the attention it deserves is because the country is very closed off and people are more concerned about what horrible thing to the world outside of North Korea the regime is likely to do next.
I don't know what point you're trying to make here but it's lost on me. Are you trying to imply that it's a good idea for North Korea to have nuclear weapons? That it avoids misery in some way? That's pathological.
Wow, I'm sorry. I will just say you uninformed about the Korean peninsula. Seoul is a city that can be bombarded by shelling of conventional weapons in very short order. This fantasy of the US having nuclear weapons in South Korea of the removal of such would lead to peace is just no congruent with reality. I recommend reading up on it; it is very fascinating and much more complicated.
You simply have no idea what you're talking about. I'm not even really sure where to begin in addressing your misconceptions, since practically everything you've said is incorrect.
I'm a little confused here. Your position is one that not even the biggest benefactor of North Korea supports (china) and is indistinguishable from the position that every regime regardless of its political structure should be able to access nuclear weapons. In other words, there should be little restrictions on the proliferation of nuclear technology.
The fact that they are conducting tests is also rather interesting. The simple devices they have developed do not require any testing and given their limited plutonium stockpile they are reducing the amount of deployable weapons by conducting their third test in six years.
I assume you would have supported South Africa's nuclear program?
I'm guessing the issue is that NK is an openly hostile country that is not only threatening its southern neighbor but also the region.
India and Pakistan may have a beef with each other, but they weren't a destabilizing force in the region, or maybe more accurately, if they were, it wasn't a huge concern of the superpowers at the time.
NK v SK conflict is not that different to India v Pakistan. The difference is... there are US troops sitting on the border of NK/SK, so agression between those to parties involves the US.
So who is the destabilising force in the region? I'm pretty sure "stability" isn't the goal (for the US) it's "Democracy".
The difference is so much greater than that. North Korea is a completely irrational regime. It is lost in a fantasy world. Pakistan, though it's stability is questionable, is not off on some bizarre ideological island. It's not as if the Pakistani government could convince it's citizens of the sort of nonsense the North Korean government does.
You seem to think having nuclear weapons is some sort of national right or something. It's not. Nobody wants an unstable, belligerent, nasty dictatorship to have the ability to nuke other countries.
Well the only reason it isn't 'some sort of national right' is because the US and their allies are the ones who made the rules which decides who can have nukes. If the US and their allies are going to develop, test, and keep nukes on hand - why should anyone else not? If they want to make a point about nuclear weapons being 'wrong', lead by example.
> You seem to think having nuclear weapons is some sort of national right or something.
No, I don't think that.
> Nobody wants an unstable, belligerent, nasty dictatorship to have the ability to nuke other countries.
The US opened this can of worms and created an imbalance in the world. North Korea is surrounded by nuclear enabled countries (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan).
As an aside:
What exactly is 'unstable' about North Korea... it's been the same ruling family for 50 years... I realise propaganda has permeated all of our views and it's difficult to see through the fog of misinformation but think about the words you use as you write them.
North Korea (from all credible reports) is a mess, and quite horrible for A LOT of people, THAT needs to change. I would not rate it any more "belligerent" than the US. It is definitely not unstable and its Nastiness extends only as far as its borders...
US troops maintain a balance of power in the region, which has allowed South Korea and Japan to develop into wealthy, stable industrialised democracies.
Regardless of the longevity of the Kim family, North Korea has an unsustainable and fragile economic and political system which is widely suspected to be susceptible to imminent collapse, with unknown consequences. They have also frequently staged unprovoked fatal military attacks on Southern territory in the last few years. They were caught trying to smuggle probable nuclear components to Burma. They were caught trying to smuggle an enormous shipload of drugs into Australia.
They are not in any way equivalent to the US in terms of odious behaviour in the region.
'The US opened this can of worms'
No it was Germany, and specifically Japan. US didn't decide out of the blue to build nukes.
US was expecting 0.5 to 4 MILLION casualties (just on US side) to invade japan as WW2 was nearing the end. Casualty on Japan would be many times bigger (most of them civilians).
The 200,000 deaths (mostly civilian), however regrettable, by the 2 nukes was considered a 'deal' compared to what an actual invasion of japan would've been.
> ... and specifically Japan. US didn't decide out of the blue to build nukes.
Seems a little unfair to Japan.
As FDR approved a project to investigate the Military Application of Uranium Detonation in October 1941. This was 2 months prior to the December 1941 Pearl Harbour attack. It seems unlikely that Japan, specifically, prompted the R&D that led to ...
In July 1945 the end result of the MAUD project came about in the Trinity tests of the first nuclear weapon, this was two months after the May 1945 German surrender, leaving the US with a weapon that needed testing and a Soviet frenemy that needed impressing.
As for the need to use nuclear weapons on Japan, well, the post war FDR FUD on that matter has obfuscated the extensive saturation bombing, using a mix of incendiaries and high explosives to burn Japanese cities to the ground that was already at play - from the Japanese perspective Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just another two cities levelled to the ground by the US, just two among the many others similarly destroyed.
There's an argument to made, and it's one for the historians, that the decisive factor for the Japanese was the fact that the Soviets were now free to invade Japanese territories. This is usually not part of the post WWII US narrative.
>> You seem to think having nuclear weapons is some sort of national right or something.
Well if it isn't a general principle you are defending then simply acquiring nuclear weapons is a good thing. Now if you think North Korea should have the ability to gain nuclear weapons then you certainly support any other country also getting access to nuclear weapons.
>The US opened this can of worms and created an imbalance in the world. North Korea is surrounded by nuclear enabled countries (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan).
Hardly. Multiple states were developing nuclear weapons at the same time and the US developed them first.
>>What exactly is 'unstable' about North Korea...
A country that keeps 200,000 of its own citizens in camps doesn't exactly seem to scream stability. Now given that China is worried about a collapse of the North Korean economy and political structure your assertion is flatly ridiculous.
>>North Korea (from all credible reports) is a mess
so it is a 'mess' yet also not unstable. Countries that can't provide basic resources to their own citizens seem to be also be unstable. I wonder why that is...
>>and quite horrible for A LOT of people, THAT needs to change.
I'm not sure how getting nuclear weapons fixes that issue. In fact, North Korea spends upwards of 50% of its GDP on the military including its nuclear program.
That's just totally ridiculous. You believe that this view of North Korean belligerence is due to propaganda. Wow. Why don't you tell that to some refugees; that's just incredible. I think you're letting some sort of cultural relativism cloud your judgment.
It is unstable not in the sense of "who is going to rule the country." It is unstable in the sense of they behave irrationally, have irrational beliefs and motivations. The same way that we, mostly, don't think that a paranoid schizophrenic should have unlimited access to assault rifles, any sane, knowledgeable person, would not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons. Wow, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
> That's just totally ridiculous. You believe that this view of North Korean belligerence is due to propaganda.
That isn't what I said. I said that they are no MORE belligerent than the US, I wasn't saying they are not belligerent. Please reread.
> It is unstable not in the sense of "who is going to rule the country." It is unstable in the sense of they behave irrationally, have irrational beliefs and motivations.
Oh sure, if we redefine what "unstable" means in the context of government, then sure, you are completely correct.
The US opened this can of worms and created an imbalance in the world. North Korea is surrounded by nuclear enabled countries (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan).
That's irrelevant. NK gaining nukes would clearly be a negative development.
Also, did you just call Japan a nuclear power? Or are you just talking about nuclear power?
This manner of moral equivocating is disturbing. Even insinuating that the US is somehow on par with North Korea on the whole "regional destabilizing" scale is frankly a little insane.
Really, you don't think the US is a destabilising element in Asia?
They were involved in 2 wars that had no relevance to US security, purely for ideological reasons... They are still involved in one of those wars... They lost the other one...
There's no "right" or "wrong" about NK doing nuclear testing, although for convenience we might phrase it that way. We don't want them to have nuclear weapons because we believe they're a belligerent, unstable regime. Yes, we opened the can of worms, but that doesn't change the power balance.
Right, so it makes sense that the US would be worried... not why the UN should sanction them.
I'm referring to the inconsistency. The implication of what you are saying is: "The UN only intervenes when it suits the US". To me that makes me think LESS of the UN sanctions, not more.
Your comment conveys another implication that UN is supposed to be impartial to issues between member countries. That cannot explain veto power of five permanent members of UN security council, which no other country has.
On consistency: I don't think UN, as a group of nations with conflicting goals, tries to behave in a consistent way, although people are free to blame it for its inconsistency.
Furthermore, as a member of the United Nations, North Korea has agreed to abide by binding decisions of the Security Council; UNSC resolution 1718 demands that North Korea not conduct any further nuclear test. This resolution was adopted under Chapter VII, meaning that the UNSC has identified North Korea's nuclear testing as a threat to the peace.
It's the manner with which they're conducting the tests. Do you think nuclear testing should be done in private by an authoritarian regime, or do you think it should be done with the acceptance and supervision of the world's scientists?
>>or do you think it should be done with the acceptance and supervision of the world's scientists?
Firstly, no self respecting nation is ever going to wait for 'acceptance' and 'supervision' of some other nation. In fact that very thing implies some sort of master-slave relationship. Countries act in their own interests(just like every other country).
Or the thousands of tests conducted by the p5. These arsenals aren't any more legitimate than Indian and Pakistani arsenals. What is needed is comprehensive disarmament, which the US and the rest of p5 are opposed to.
Your comment is an example of why this kind of propaganda works. People start hating another country they've (likely) never been to, and likely have no understanding of their motives.
This is sensationalist news at its finest. There is only one way to confirm that a nuclear bomb test has occurred and it is not by measuring 'resulting' earthquakes. Until either the US Gov't or the very top at the IAEA states there was a successful test, this is nothing but linkbait. Frankly, given the tensions right now between the North and South, and that it seems the North, with the Passing of Kim Jung Il, might be more willing to open up, I find this type of reporting and grandstanding for views really infuriating.
Man-made explosions, both chemical and nuclear, have seismic signatures that are substantially different than natural sources and which have been measured countless times from US and Soviet testing. The earthquake sensor feeds are often scrubbed of non-earthquake sources; ever wonder how they do that?
There is a possibility that it is a chemical explosion, if you are willing to swallow the idea that the North Koreans detonated several million kilos of military high explosives in a mine shaft somewhere. But even then, while the signature is closer to a nuclear explosion it is not identical. Maybe the seismic data from a variety of sources is damaged or defective but I'm not counting on it.
Have you considered the possibility that you are the one over-reacting? Our ability to classify seismic motion is much more sophisticated than you seem to be assuming. It is the same reason they can tell whether an earthquake swarm in a particular spot is caused by local fault activity or the imminent emergence of a volcano -- the signature is different. There is a lot more to analyzing seismic activity than just the magnitude. It is also how we do subsurface imaging for mining oil. It is a mathematically sophisticated field, give it some respect.
Seems like a little more than link bait: "South Korea and the US placed their forces in South Korea on alert in the wake of the rumoured blast as reports emerged that North Korea may have yesterday given the US and China advance warning of the test."
Edit - From http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/12/world/asia/north-korea-nuc...: "Tibor Toth, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), said the seismic event's location was "roughly congruent with" nuclear tests carried out by North Korea in 2006 and 2009."
An earthquake 1000m below the surface on Nuclear Test Road (not a joke: type the coordinates into Google Maps) which occurs after a week of nuclear test threats and has a slightly larger magnitude than the last North Korean test is unlikely to be a coincidence.
I'm positive that North Korea wants the world to believe that they're testing nuclear weapons, because that is their only bargaining card, but that doesn't mean they made a successful test.
NK stated they would perform a nuke test on this date and location.
Which do you think is more likely, a) the tremors are from a nuke test b) Kim Jong performed a mystical ancient Korean wardance that happened to summon an earthquake at the designated time and place?
If North Korea could trigger earthquakes at will, I think that would be even bigger news than a nuclear test (not to mention being a plot worthy of a James Bond movie).
Aside from "issuing even more sanctions" what options are available to the UN? Good luck trying to send in a team of people to destroy the nuclear program, that will all but invite a warhead/attack.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...