North Korea

A few days after KJU made his speech, Italian media reported to have a North Korean diplomat seeking asylum in the country.

Courtesy of AP:

I sure hope he has poison antidotes. Unless he wants to end up like the younger Kim and get poisoned by some random North Korean spy.

EDIT: Ah, gotcha. My mistake.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Jan 3rd 2019 at 6:15:33 AM

Elder Kim. Kim Jong Un is the youngest of the three brothers. The one who got assassinated was the eldest brother who got kicked from the line of succession for getting caught trying to sneak into Japan on a false passport to visit Tokyo Disney.

More updates on what happened in Italy:

This is from AFP.

KJU is making an unannounced visit to Beijing.

As such, police in China have enacted security measures at the station where his train is such as not allowing guests to register at rooms where the station can be easily seen.

North Korea’s Less-Known Military Threat: Biological Weapons

South Korea supplied oil to North Korea and didn’t tell anyone

The thing with Bioweapons is that you're pissing in the wind blowing at you when you use them. Sure, the enemy will die horribly - so will you because Microbes don't ask about your flag or ideology before they kill you.

If them using Nukes is far-fetched, using Bioweapons is all the way out there on the crazy scale. Of course, this being Best Korea we're talking about, that's not very comforting.

300 tonnes doesn't seem like much to lose sleep over. Yeah, it was stupid of the ROK to not be on the ball regarding that, but hardly a big deal.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Jan 24th 2019 at 7:06:58 AM

Bioweapons in the context of a strategic target do not approach the level of a serious threat to the army using it unless they are effectively firing on themselves. They are loaded in long-range platforms and delivered by aerial bombs or rockets/missiles to distant targets. Not all bio-weapons target humans either, just most of them and not all of them are high lethality variants. There are several varieties that are meant to incapacitate and tie up infrastructure and supplies caring for the sick rather than causing a quick burn out doom plague. Who knows what glass vials of nasty the North has though. I don't think anyone wants to find out.

I fear a possible "if we can't have you, nobody will" happening to the entire peninsula... -_- Adaptation and containment? Possible (in time), but... the loss of life... <shudders>

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 24th 2019 at 12:52:00 PM

Yeah, that is a scary thought. North Korea, the abusive SO.

As with everything North Korean, the threat is more that they’ll make things utterly miserable than actually outright destroy anything. Most experts believe that the majority of their bioweapons are of the “tie up infrastructure” variety, they don’t have the high-tech facilities needed to make anything truly virulent and they see weapons like these mainly as a means to tie up South Korean forces in the rear.

Don’t forget that they ultimately want to absorb and rule over South Korea. That’s the goal for them.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 24th 2019 at 7:53:13 AM

I honestly don't know which would be worse: accidentally causing the biggest biohazard zone the world has ever witnessed out of a misguided attempt to gain (!maintain!) control (or out of simply a series of endemic cock-ups).. Or deliberately trying to pull a regional murder-suicide out of a bout of spite. :/

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 24th 2019 at 4:21:59 PM

It wouldn’t really be a “zone”, it’s not likely it would spread evenly in the region or even stay in the region at all. That’s one of the reasons China is so worried, the refugee crisis that would almost certainly occur would spread any attempts at biological warfare all over the place.

It would become a zone of currently an unpredictable size and exact geographic area.

Which would cover a fair chunk of the peninsula. Which could easily include part of China (because that, too, has a geographical presence on the peninsula, however slight, since it doesn't just abutt it via a river border and mountain range). And all this would also include run-off into the ocean currents to affect fishing and other activities throughout the region. But, there's plenty of water to dilute the nasty to safer levels as the distance increases.

That kind of was my point: whatever happens in the "North Korea effectively biohazards chunks of itself and its sibling" scenario, it'll impact more than just those two. But, the zone would still "stabilize" itself (for want of a better word). New borders would find a way to reflect that.

The price? Horror and time.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 25th 2019 at 11:25:20 AM

Well, I don’t know if it would stabilize and form a region. Biowarfare agents are engineered for virulence and transmissibility, after the initial delivery they don’t really hang around in the air or water. There wouldn’t be a geographic “biohazard zone”, rather it would follow the patterns of human movement around the conflict.

Specifically I think you’d see it enter China and spread in lower-end population centers there, which are pretty much the ideal location for something like that, given how crowded they are and the lowered sanitation standards. From there you’d probably see it make the jump to Russia or India next.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 25th 2019 at 4:50:53 AM

Like the refugees that will likely get very creative escaping the quarantine zone?

Right in one. Deliberately infecting refugees is actually something North Korea has threatened.

I was thinking a few steps after the inevitable "whoops, we dead" happening to the top of North Korea's pyramid. Because playing silly buggers with bioweapons in a country with that many heuristic inefficiencies... Yeah: blow-back.

As I said: horror and time.

I mean, once the initial infection event happens the bioweapons themselves will more or less be gone. They’re not like radioactivity, they won’t stick around and create dangerous areas. If you’re vaccinated, or know what the disease is and block the vector, you’re pretty much fine as well. It’s also worth considering that a biowarfare attack spreads outward like a wave, as it kills the earliest infectees areas that may have previously been dangerous due to a high concentration of infected individuals become safe again, and human motion away from the attack site moves the danger away as well.

One of the reasons biowarfare isn’t particularly prominent is that it’s very hard to get an attack to stick, especially in developed countries. Biowarfare is also essentially useless in a military context.

Really they’re one of the least dangerous WM Ds, though one of the most frightening. The rumor is that the N Ks are mainly developing them with an eye towards assassination, which would make sense, though outbreaks among refugees are another big worry.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 25th 2019 at 6:05:39 AM

Well, that is true for most bioweapons. There are a few that are area denial variety and one that can last a really long time in just about any condition. I forgot what most are but they are the variety that can form a cyst or something similar around the pathogen. Anthrax, naturally occurring varieties no less are both lethal and amazingly resilient. It takes a good bit of effort to decon an area contaminated by the substance. The infectious spores can survive for decades. Immunization can protect against some vectors of transmission but if you inhale or ingest spore your screwed regardless. The actual weaponized variety is horrifying. The Gruinard Test island remained contaminated for decades and it took hundreds of metric tons of a formaldehyde solution and removal of the most contaminated portions of soil to return the island to habitability. You hit a modern cityscape with that and you may as well burn down the city scrape a couple feet of soil and start over from scratch.

Even the naturally occurring strains used as bioweapons against a city like Seoul would be utterly devastating and create a contaminated zone that could last decades.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 25th 2019 at 7:58:07 AM

Anthrax and its cousins and derivatives are what you're thinking of — there are super anthraxes knocking about, for all the "normal" version is bad enough as it is.

Oh, anthrax is a barrel of fun...

Heck, the various kinds of developed yersinia pestis strains have theoretical dormancy cycles of centuries, given the right conditions. (Normal black death can still be contacted from archaeological digs in and around Europe, especially if you run into a plague pit during a dig — it's only one of the persistent biological hazards you can pick up from handling sites, however, although it is among the biggest reasons why you go protective until you have worked out what you are dealing with, especially in York — nobody, for example, wants to accidentally reawaken whatever the sweating sickness was, let alone allow an older 'flu back into the system or bring back a particular lovely, older strain of typhoid that could join forces with newer strains to do nasty, nasty things.)

And, that's not counting some of the inorganic (or just less biological) chemicals that can take ages to degrade to something bearable, what with being specifically designed to break down nastily over decades.

Euo: Oh I know. But the stuff they used was a particularly virulent natural strain and Anthrax seems to be favored bioweapon overall. Like you mentioned there are bucket loads of already existing nasty naturally occurring bioweapons to be had fairly easily. North Korea quite likely has the gear to work with and weaponize a fair few of them especially anything that can form into spores or cysts.

The nasty thing about bioweapons is they are fairly flexible in their deployment in most cases. Everything from hand-carried dispersal means to agents delivered by long-range rockets.

The kicker with using strains that are naturally occurring or not far removed from naturally occurring is that they have a very strong tendency to spread beyond their intended use and are far more likely to possibly mutate. The high-end superpower bioweapons have been heavily modified to fill roles and more or less behave in a certain way. North Korea likely doesn't have access to cutting edge superpower designed agents but I could quite easily believe they have ease of access to naturally occurring contaminants.

An article from Ars Technica about the bioweapon leak in the then Soviet city of Sverdlovsk. It was a relatively small leak and it killed very quickly. This was a weaponized anthrax strain. This article gives a good break down on the event in general and some of the problems of dealing with as of yet unencountered bioweapons.

Decades after a deadly lab accident, a secret Russian bioweapon decoded.

Basically, the article will give you a rough idea of what could happen if any modern population center got hit with a lethal strain bioweapon.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 25th 2019 at 8:22:57 AM

I’m sure they have anthrax, but it’s believed that smallpox is their agent of choice. It’s known they’ve done extensive testing with it, and have likely made efforts to make it more contagious.

Even the old school horrors that are mustard gas and chlorine shells still can cause problems today in the battlefields that were particularly saturated with the random mixes of the earliest stuff (and I don't mean the occasional unexploded shell with likely ineffectual amounts of them still popping up). Odd things continue to happen to plant and animal development in the places still recovering from WWI. Which, in all likelihood, is also linked to the amount of lead and other nastiness that was thrown together with gay abandon, wot-wot.

I hate to think how long parts of Afghanistan are going to take to fully recover, given some of the Spark-level combos of ad hoc "experimentation" in mixed shelling various places have faced over the decades. <_<

Edited by Euodiachloris on Jan 25th 2019 at 3:44:56 PM