Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers:
Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.
Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.
The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.
Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
If you think losing DNS root servers means that NK would have to use smoke signals then I think you don't understand how the internet works frankly. If you blocked your own computers access to the DNS root servers right now you probably wouldn't even notice the difference
+1, One cab likely also presume that especially DNS at the root level is already handled locally for NK. They reportedly have their own intranet so presumably they also have common services like DNS hosted their.
Of course but the contention is that Internet infrastructure, of which DNS is a fairly indicative example, is controlled by US entities.
It’s not, but it mostly is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other centralised components — hardware, cables, numbering, protocols — were similarly organized.
It would be very easy to run without DNS. Just have someone bring a decent sized chunk of the world's DNS entries into the country in a diplomatic pouch every month.
The US owns the world, the same way any big empire does. Exersice of soft power when it works, and violently explosive power when it doesn't. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, not from who owns some DNS servers.
When was the last time they used that "explosive power" to good effect? They got humiliated in Afghanistan and Russia isn't even scared to act out any more. The only people who think America still rules the world is it's delusional populace.
America is unquestionably the foremost cultural, financial
, and military power on earth. The fact that your best example is a war that america lost voluntarily because they were unwilling to engage in scorched earth tactics is pretty telling. Afghanistan was a quagmire with no real starting goal, no real end condition, and no motivation to fight. If america decided to drop a few platoons into the country and massacre civilians with mechanized infantry and close air support it would have been over in a month, but to what end? It would make them barely better than the Russians who tried to actually use those tactics and didn't have the resources to pull it off.
Both conflicts were about punishment and troop training, and they achieved that. If they wanted to they could have razed every square km with conventional weapons alone.
Americans keep saying this and it makes me laugh every time, because you didn't learn anything from Vietnam.
Just like in Vietnam, the stated goal was to replace the government - in this case, to remove the Taliban - that's why you created the Afghan National Army and their flimsy democracy. All told, the US has spent $8 trillion and several thousand young men on the GWOT. Once the US pulled out, the Taliban strolled back into Kabul.
$8 trillion will reduce the US debt by 25%, or pay off all student debt, or build 80 million $100k homes. Wasted, and the only thing you have to show for it is nothing tangible, except more vibrant terror groups, and immigrants flooding Europe. Meanwhile, 8k US veterans die by suicide yearly.
You had the firepower but failed to achieve your political goals. Just like in Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and more countries than I care to mention. While ruining the lives of innocent millions, of course.
So, you failed. Admitting it might be hard, but it will bring the US to a place of humility and help you avoid adventures like this going forward.
And to be pedantic, no you can't raze every sq. km of 652,860 km². Assuming, even just 1000 tons of explosives per km2, that's nearly 700 million tons of explosives. At $30k a ton, you'd be spending $21 trillion on enough explosives.
Yes, for destabilizing Libya and Syria. Those millions of Syrian immigrants that suddenly started flooding Europe had been living contently in their homeland. What changed starting in 2014? Gaddafi was a major force in stemming illegal immigration through the Sahara. What changed in Libya in 2011?
The US hasn't destabilized Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, yet they get migrants from those countries. And Gaddafi also got screwed by Szarkozy and Tony Blair. The US probably had other plans which didn't quite work out as intended.
Hah! The US has a long and shameful history of meddling in Latin America: coups, outright invasions (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc.) and overthrows or assassinations of democratically-elected leaders considered leftist.
Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, etc.
Haiti: Historian Hans Schmidt notes that, “US Navy ships visited Haitian ports to ‘protect American lives and property’ in 1857, 1859, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913. Finally, tired of all those round trips, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934."
Among others, in the 1980s, a Guatemalan military that received U.S. support carried out scorched earth campaigns that massacred upwards of 200,000 mostly indigenous people [1].
And that's before you count all the other American-trained and armed military juntas that systematically murdered, tortured, and raped millions of dissidents "leftists" with Uncle Sam's blessing.
Wikipedia has an entire page on it: go take a look. [2]
Wait, that's what you caught from all I just explained? I don't even feel the need to explain anything, but if you want to actually debunk any of the assertions I made, I'll be waiting.
Not only in Latin America. The US also continues to keep their fascist allies alive in Europe, Asia, Africa and everywhere else.
Every leftist country will either be undermined secretly (Europe), will have fake elections to overcome this problem (Latin America), or endure another fascist coup.
In Europe this fascist US backed coups happened until the 70ies. Now the press is enough to vilify citizens and workers rights.
A bit of fun ... but my opinion is that a war with decades long ceasefire is common-law armistice. At the very least, stopping shelling is some sort of détente.
I'll admit that "War" is a somewhat colloquial term nowadays, for better or worse.
I disagree, it is still war-proper if you have troops amassed at each others border, constantly training to invade each other and developing weapons (NK's ICBM aresnal) specifically to target the other guys (you need ICBMs to target america,not SK). If american policy changed and america withdrew troops from SK, there will be a continuation of the Korean war, since NK's leadership believes the US is the only thing standing in their way of unifying the korean people.
NK can't strike the United States. Their low-quality "ICBM" probably can't even target another continent. They really have poor ballistic missiles. On the other hand, NK can't be targeted except from a sub in the ocean, or over Russia by ours.
I thought they at least claimed they can hit the west coast of the US? and that US ICBMs, launched from the US mainland can strike any target in the world.
tl;dr answer is "Eh, its not so simple." but you're right on a basic level.
No, the North Korean ballistic missiles have from my non-classified top-of-the-head understanding a range of around 1000 to 3000 KM. The best-case scenario ranges that are sabre-rattled are certainly theoretical. They do not have ICBM capability and are not capable of launching an ICBM or exiting the Earth's atmosphere, but they do threaten Japan.
Strike capabilities reaching North Korea do indeed exist. All three legs of the nuclear triad may strike a North Korean target, but airplanes must sortie from the Pacific (leaving them vulnerable to detection, interception or suppression) or follow the course of a land-based ballistic missile strike which by necessity must pass over Russia, China, or much less feasibly, India.
As you mention we do have ICBMs that are capable of striking basically and literally anywhere on the planet. This is not really enough, because those ICBMs must pass through many, many layers of enemy strategic defenses.
From a nuclear arms point of view, its likely that our longest range reach-out-and-touch-ya' weapon systems really need to carpet-bomb entire regions and cities to achieve their designed operational objective. In effect, we're going to lose too much accuracy as well as ordinance to shoot-downs, reducing our effectiveness in the vicinity to a near minimum. Minimum lethality is quite lethal, but considering a maniacal super-villain's armored bunker really and truly is what we need to begin constructing a realistic view of the challenges set forth here. This analysis completely disregards the possible side effect of poisoning Seoul, South Korea with nuclear fallout as well as triggering a chain reaction of thermonuclear retaliatory strikes in a horrific reprisal of the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
In short, its in a tricky spot. Luckily, the most danger they (North Korea) pose is to local Pacific naval operations, intense cold-war era artillery bombardment of South Korea (Seoul) or the possibility of a regionally effective ballistic missile. In addition to these threats, they also pose cybersecurity, money laundering and counterfeiting risks and of course, their people are starving in a totalitarian hell-hole regime.
I hope that one day there is an end to the pointless suffering of the people who live in North Korea.
Japan and Russia don't have armies ready to kill each other standing by at each others' borders. There is no peace treaty to be signed between NK and SK because the conflict behind the war is still unresolved. They are actively sending spies to sabotage each other. NK built nukes specifically because of this conflict. They didn't build ICBMs for the sake of it, they built it to nuke america because of this active state of war.
