Korea Thread: Liberal Moon Jae In Elected

[jimmy olsen]

Hey Tim, have you ever seen the movie The Admiral: Roaring Currents? It is apparently the most popular movie (among Koreans) ever shown in Korea.

I saw it last night - it was a fun actioner, though naturally they just had to spice up the action with a lot of martial arts silliness (the historical battle appears to have been a rather one-sided pummeling by the Korean cannon; in the movie, the Korean Admiral Yi personally dispatches the Japanese big bad with his sword).

If you want to see a much better war movie, watch The Northern Limit Line, it's absolutely fantastic. It's about a naval skirmish along the border in 2002. Much more traditional war movie from a western point of view. You've got the hardassed, career driven, but competent young officer and the knucklehead crew that can't get along at first but slowly comes together.

[spoiler]The movie ends in a hellacious firefight with a North Korean ship. Six of the 24 crewmen die and the rest are wounded badly. There are some absolutely heartrending scenes with the mortally wounded. The post script says one of the survivors was later killed when the Choenan was torpedoed.[/spoiler]

Being set in 2002 it gives you a much better understanding of modern Korean culture.

[Admiral Yi]

Is that the movie with a T34 turret mounted on a ship?

[jimmy olsen]

Is that the movie with a T34 turret mounted on a ship?

Yup, North Korean engineering at its finest! 

[jimmy olsen]

Hey Tim, have you ever seen the movie The Admiral: Roaring Currents? It is apparently the most popular movie (among Koreans) ever shown in Korea.

I saw it last night - it was a fun actioner, though naturally they just had to spice up the action with a lot of martial arts silliness (the historical battle appears to have been a rather one-sided pummeling by the Korean cannon; in the movie, the Korean Admiral Yi personally dispatches the Japanese big bad with his sword).

If you want to see a much better war movie, watch The Northern Limit Line, it's absolutely fantastic. It's about a naval skirmish along the border in 2002. Much more traditional war movie from a western point of view. You've got the hardassed, career driven, but competent young officer and the knucklehead crew that can't get along at first but slowly comes together.

[spoiler]The movie ends in a hellacious firefight with a North Korean ship. Six of the 24 crewmen die and the rest are wounded badly. There are some absolutely heartrending scenes with the mortally wounded. The post script says one of the survivors was later killed when the Choenan was torpedoed.[/spoiler]

Being set in 2002 it gives you a much better understanding of modern Korean culture.

Further commentary

===

As an American who's lived in S. Korea for six years there is definitely political and social commentary that's going on that people who don't know much about Korea won't get.

The age difference between the Lt. Commander and many of his subordinates is one. That's a facet of Confucianism, which causes lots of problems in the military chain of command. Lower ranked people must follow higher ranked ones, and they usually do not feel comfortable making objections to even what they believe are stupid ideas. They just nod their heads and follow orders. That makes the Lt. Commander seem quite bold when he objects about the rules of engagement to his senior officer, and is why his female friend is so surprised that he does so.   The fact that the Lt. Commander is younger than his senior noncommissioned officers is difficult.  They must obey him, but when he gives orders to them that are unpopular it feels particularly forceful and rude to them. It is part of why he is such an uncompromising hardass, he has to be to assert his authority over them.

The senior noncommissioned officers are career sailors, but the younger sailors on the boats are conscripts. All Korean men must serve two years in the military. So there's a divide between the younger and older guys that goes beyond age. The older guys are their voluntarily and working class, while the younger guys are forced to be there and have mixed background. The Lt. Commander on the other hand, clearly comes for an upper class family that is relatively well off despite his father's career ending in disgrace. They have their own house with a garden, which makes them very well off by Korean standards where most folks live in apartments. So there's an undercurrent of class conflict throughout the whole movie. None of this stuff is explained since the movie was made for a Korean audience.

There's political commentary as well. This was the era of the "Sunshine Policy" which was the policy of the then liberal president to appease the North. The repeated criticism of the rules of engagement being too strict is only one part of that. The references on the TV at the end of the movie to the President visiting Japan (which most Koreans still resent for their colonialism) instead of the victims is a big shot at him, as well as the fact that tours of the North still continued in wake of the attack. Beacause of this incident, and the later sinking of the Choenan (which killed 50 sailors, including a survivor of this battle) and the shelling of Yeongpyeong Island, the rules of engagements have been loosened and Presidents with a much more hardline policy against North Korea have been elected.

[Razgovory]

Did Tyr ever back up his "comfort women" statements.

[Admiral Yi]

Yes.

[Razgovory]

Okay, good.  I was concerned that it's possible that Americans were not forcing millions Korean women into sexual slavery.

[Admiral Yi]

what we have here is a failure to communicate.

[jimmy olsen]

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/02/10/after_north_koreas_launch_whos_mad_now_111699-2.html

After North Korea's Launch, Who's M.A.D Now?
By Daniel McGroarty

As TV ratings roll in for Super Bowl 50, a globally-minded NFL boasts that the game was broadcast to viewers in more than 170 countries. North Korean ballistic missile technicians were apparently not among them. They were busy with a Super Sunday of their own, preparing a long-range missile launch with a satellite in the payload bay -- just the place a nuclear weapon might someday sit.

The North Korean missile launch took place roughly one hour before kickoff. In fact, the satellite itself passed directly over Levi's Stadium, the site of the Super Bowl, about an hour after the game ended. Whatever else may be said about Kim Jong Un, you have to acknowledge the North Korean leader's flair for the dramatic.


With an estimated range of 9,000 kilometers, North Korea's newest missile brings Alaska, half of Canada and a swath of the United States from Southern California to Minnesota under its bullseye. And the launch comes just one month after North Korea's underground detonation of what Pyongyang claimed was its first test of a hydrogen bomb -- a doubly-dangerous advance, as H-bombs are both magnitudes more powerful than atomic bombs, and far more easily miniaturized.

In the United States, the tests have triggered calls for new and tighter sanctions, perhaps another U.N. resolution, and increased moral suasion on China -- North Korea's only ally -- to rein in "Respected Comrade Kim."

In North Korea's neighborhood, key U.S. allies are looking for something a bit more robust than a U.N. pronouncement to protect them from Kim's nuclear arsenal.

The United States and South Korea announced immediate discussions on deploying the U.S.-built Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, on U.S. military bases in and around Seoul. Japan deployed an American Patriot PAC-3 missile defense system in downtown Tokyo days before the North Korean launch. Japan already deploys ship-based Aegis systems -- again, U.S.-made -- to provide first-line upper-atmosphere defense.

America's Asian allies aren't alone in their interest in missile defense. In the Middle East, the United States has contributed upwards of $1.5 billion to help Israel develop and field Iron Dome for terminal defense, with additional funds for David's Sling and Arrow, providing mid-range and high-altitude protection.

The game theory of missile defense

Ironically, the United States itself relies less on the very defense systems its allies seek than on a theory that holds missile defense itself to be the true danger. Aside from a handful of THAAD batteries, including installations in Hawaii and Guam, plus a total of 30 Ground-Based-Interceptor missiles split between Fort Greely, Alaska, and California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, the U.S. missile defense effort is largely an RDT&E project.

It wasn't always this way. Long before Nike was a shoe, it was a site -- 265 anti-missile Nike Sites, as they were dubbed, dotted the American landscape in the early 1960s, arrayed to engage Soviet nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles on their Arctic flight path toward American targets. The means was brute force: The original Nike was itself nuclear-armed, exploding in the exo-atmosphere to vaporize incoming Soviet missiles by thermal flux.

As the need to detonate a nuclear missile to defeat a nuclear attack attests, the desire to defend was greater than the technology itself. The challenge of "hitting a bullet with a bullet" also ran headlong into a theoretical objection to missile defense, rooted in game theory: Missile defense wasn't just ineffective, it was downright dangerous.

Missile defense was linked to an offensive counter-force strategy -- U.S missiles would strike Soviet missile sites, depleting the counter-strike, which would make the task of missile defense exponentially easier. The notion of missile defense, therefore, came to be provocative -- it raised the prospect of the real use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps it was better to be defenseless -- naked against nuclear attack -- which would give both sides, the U.S. and the Soviet, the best of existential reasons to never initiate an attack. Such was the logic of M.A.D. -- Mutual Assured Destruction.

As the Americans and Soviets entered the arms control era, missile defense came to be seen as trade-bait -- a questionable capability to be swapped for the main prize, nuclear weapons reductions -- culminating in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Under the treaty's terms, both sides were allowed two missile defense sites, one each around the capitals of Moscow and Washington, D.C., and the other at a site hosting intercontinental ballistic missiles. The United States never built its system to protect the capital; it maintained a rudimentary system around a missile installation in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and in a few years abandoned even that. The Kremlin's leaders, meanwhile, built their treaty-permitted anti-ballistic missile system around the capital -- an insurance policy against any U.S. president mad enough to abandon M.A.D.

Star Wars and slogans

Then along came Ronald Reagan. His SDI -- the Strategic Defense Initiative -- was meant to defend against Soviet nuclear attack, but the first anti-SDI salvo came from Senator Ted Kennedy, who denounced the "reckless Star Wars scheme," a brilliant pop-culture riposte playing on Reagan's Hollywood past and the mass mania of sci-fi fans then awaiting the release of George Lucas's "Return of the Jedi."


Fast behind Kennedy's first strike came a withering pre-emptive launch of counter-criticisms. The Soviets will overwhelm an imperfect system with a nuclear barrage. They'll deploy sophisticated missiles with multiple warheads. They'll deploy real missiles among fakes filled with chaff to spoof any missile defense.

Even a single missile slipping through would wreak damage beyond our imagining. As the bumper stickers of the day proclaimed, "One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day." In the closed-loop logic of M.A.D adherents, if a missile system wasn't perfect, it would be provocative. As no system could promise perfection, none should be deployed.


Fast forward to this first fifth of the 21st Century, and the question is who's M.A.D now?

Chaff, MIRVs, a massive barrage: The objections launched against the old "Star Wars" SDI don't pertain. A nuclear North Korea or Iran will have none of these.

But they may be armed with something we now know the Soviets lacked: a life-affirming fear of nuclear annihilation. Unmoored from institutional instincts of self-preservation, North Korea's dictator and Iran's mullahs could do more damage with a single nuclear weapon -- or several -- than the Soviets and Americans bristling with tens of thousands of the devices. Turns out that old Cold War bumper sticker was right after all: "One Nuclear Weapon Can Ruin Your Whole Day."

Which brings us back to the present. North Korea tested its bomb and launched its missile, and word now is that yet another nuclear test may be in the offing. As for Iran, last year's grand nuclear deal notwithstanding, we're now told by U.S. officials that should Tehran choose to break out, its sprint to a bomb would take 12 months at most.

The choice is ours: We can rest our security on the power of our intelligence agencies to predict the next breakout, or to discern when the next test launch is really a surprise attack. Or we can get serious about deploying the missile defenses our allies understand are essential in our world of nuclear rogue nations. There's nothing M.A.D about that.

[Alcibiades]

I'll be in (South) Korea for a little while, soon.  No fun, though.   

[jimmy olsen]

I'll be in (South) Korea for a little while, soon.  No fun, though.   

No time for a meet up?

[Razgovory]

I'll be in (South) Korea for a little while, soon.  No fun, though.   

Deployment?

[Alcibiades]

I'll be in (South) Korea for a little while, soon.  No fun, though.   

No time for a meet up?

Don't believe so, I'll be a little more restricted - not stationed there.

[jimmy olsen]

Too bad.

If things change, let me know!

[Maximus]

Alci's a spook now.