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Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

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71–80 of 134 posts

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#71
post #39

Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades .

Except we aren't blameless either for the state North Korea ended up in. We leveled nearly every building in the country, we even targeted rural thatch huts with bombing runs. We dropped so many bombs on North Korea that the bombers started dropping bombs on thrice bombed rubble and open land because they couldn't find any targets left to attack. Why should we be surprised that a strong arm authoritarian leadership rose up among the chaos and put every effort towards military power and obtaining nuclear weapons at the expense of everything else?

I can't even say that they made the wrong decision either, North Korea still exists as an independent nation which is amazing in itself.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#72
post #39

Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades .

It will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.

Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#73
post #39

Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades .

At least NK's human rights abuses are contained within their borders. I hope future generations will look back on the many US invasions of foreign countries over the years and all the war crimes that took place during those invasions with the scrutiny they deserve.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.

Think how many tens of millions could have been saved if we had ended the Soviet Union as Churchill advocated, before the world got nukes.

Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#75
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way we could match them in numbers on the ground. Such a conflict would have inevitably led to us nuking them as a result. Which is probably the reason decision makers chose not to.

And maybe that's really the humanitarian failure. That USA didn't nuke China in 1950 or 1951. Would have solved a lot of problems for generations of people.

Maybe the real humanitarian failure is that the US didn't nuke everybody and start over from the stone age. Can't any societal problems if no societies exist, right?

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#76
post #39

Can we back up and just recognize how insane North Korea is? I think that future generations will look back on our history and wonder why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades .

I will get buried for saying this, but DPRK survived as a people, investing everything into a nuclear program to survive. The reason nobody did anything is they firmly built a defense against intervention, and given how the korean war went, how various US interventions looked after that, it was the correct thing to do. The most the US could do to them in recent years was murder some innocent fishermen. It has tried t…

s/DRPK survived as a people/Kim dynasty survived in power/g.

Sure it was a correct thing for Kims to do, millions of Koreans be damned.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think how many tens of millions could have been saved if we had ended the Soviet Union as Churchill advocated, before the world got nukes.

Does any serious historian believe that fully defeating the Soviet Union after WWII would have been possible? Even with the advantage of nuclear weapons, I doubt the US would have made it very far.

It was way too late, look up Operation Unthinkable.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#78
post #63
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we know what happened to North Korea after China "won". And it's pretty fucking god-awful for 10s of millions of people for 80+ years. USA dropping nukes probably would have been the better outcome for humanity.

USA dropping nukes would have prevented the convention against using nukes in wars from being started. I think there's a pretty good chance we wouldn't have any civilization left by now if we went down that fork in history.

How is nuking Japan different from nuking Korea? Everybody agrees that forcing Japan to surrender with nukes was much better for everyone involved than a ground invasion.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will definitely go down as one of the biggest failures of mankind. Especially since it was so easily preventable if MacArthur was permitted to just take the whole peninsula.

Or how about us not blowing them to bits in the first place? South Korea was on the very edge of capitulation before the US came in full force and even most South Korean citizens were in support of Korean unification at that time. The current state of North Korea would have never come to reality if they hadn't been blown to bits by the US because of big ol' scary "communism".

So, piecemeal cede every bit of land to the evil? Like Trump wants with Ukraine now?

If you exclude the outliers like Campuchia and Nazi Germany, even the most benign commies are always way more deadly than the most ferocious fascists.

Re: Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The min bend radius isn’t that large in my experience. On the order of 10cm IIRC, possibly even less.

Even less is correct: outdoor fibers (G.652.D) have a minimum bend radius of about 30mm. The indoor counterpart (G.657.A1 and A2) have 10mm and 7.5mm.

Those are more of a technically no?

Like I have fiber to the house and you really need to pinch it and whatnot to cause an internet outage.

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