Demented North At It Again

Once again, North Korea is provoking the South. This time they decided to lob a couple of hundred artillery shells onto Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea. This is an island occupied mostly by civilians ... yes there are military troops there ... but they are there to protect the civilians.

This ... let's call it like it is ... ACT OF WAR, resulted in the deaths of 2 Korean Marines, 2 Civilians and the injury of 18 other civilians. And what was the response? Nada ... zilch ... zip. Counter-battery fire should have been immediate and overwhelming. The US has 28,000 troops in South Korea (most of them on the DMZ) that are for lack of a better word, "hostages" to the vagaries of Korean diplomacy. We cannot allow these troops to continue to be caught in the middle of two 1,000,000 man armies.

We need to withdraw our troops from the DMZ and protect South Korea from the sea and the air. These troops are just a symbol of our support ... they should not be hung out to dry.

A scary development seems to be unfolding. It seems that South Korean military that have been examining some 20 unexploded rounds have determined that these are vacuum bombs. These bombs ... also known as fuel-air bombs, thermobaric bombs and aerosol bombs ... are particularly nasty. They consist of two explosives and fuel. The first explosive spreads the fuel through the air and the second, detonates the fuel. This results in an enormous blast wave that disintegrates whatever is below. The over-pressures resulting from this type of bomb are very similar to a nuclear weapon. These are of course very small bombs (they have to fit on the rockets launched from the Norths' MLRS's, but the technology is pretty much the same to construct a larger weapon.

Something must be done to reign in the madman Kim Jong Il. I'm just not sure what it is ... and I definitely don't trust the current administration to solve this problem. I wouldn't put it past the administration to get us into another messy war to distract us from the US economy and Obama care.

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Japan Dodges A Bullet

A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck Japan early this morning. Besides opening cracks up to 3 feet in width in the streets, this earthquake also caused a fire and radioactive water leak at the worlds largest nuclear power plant. It took 2 hours to extinguish the fire in the Kashiwazaki plant and 315 gallons of slightly radioactive water leaked out into the Sea of Japan.

Things could have been much worse. This plant was cutting edge as far as safety and design, but what if this had happened to a power plant without the great design and construction that this plant had? What if this plant had been in North Korea or Iran ... not exactly countries at the top of nuclear engineering? We could have had another Chernobyl or worse. With so many countries seeing nuclear power as the answer to their growing energy needs, we need to make sure our nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is not only guarding against substandard design, this watchdog needs to have teeth. They need to be able to shut down substandard plants and have the world behind them in confrontations with Nations that refuse their orders to shut down or upgrade these plants.

With international politics at play, and not knowing what the UN Security Council will vote on any given issue, maybe it would be better to allow the IAEA to put in place and enforce sanctions on any nation that does not play ball, without first having to go to the Security Council. Nuclear energy can be clean and safe (and is for most of the power plants out there), but for the substandard plants ... nuclear power can be a very scary thing.

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