|
North Korea's Threat Might Be Worse Than We Think
[AmericanThinker]. If the U.S. pre-emptively attacks North Korea, Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and other places in Asia might get blasted in retaliation, but America will have knocked out North Korea's nuclear capability. Right?Wrong ‐ at least in the opinion of a U.S. senior intelligence consultant who worked on a secret study of North Korea's nuclear program for the government and disagrees with widespread intelligence opinion, echoed by the press, that there are no viable options for dealing with North Korea's nuclear threat except negotiations. Dwight R. Rider, 30 years a targeting specialist for the U.S. with a master's degree from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), says the reason the U.S. intelligence community (I.C.) says negotiation is the only option is that the I.C. rejected the study his group made that identified hidden nuclear facilities and weapons in North Korea and now realizes they don't know where to target. Thus, in their minds, any pre-emptive attack might have only minimal effect on North Korea's capability and leave the rogue state with plenty of retaliation options. Rider is so worried about the U.S. making wrong decisions regarding what to do about the North Korean threat that he's decided to go public, including writing a letter to President Trump and other officials he thinks might be able to influence Trump's actions. "It is unlikely that long-standing issues between North Korea and the U.S. can be resolved through negotiation," Rider writes in the letter to the president. "Any effort to force North Korea" to bow to outside pressure "means regime change." That's not acceptable to North Korea, he says. Therefore, "some level of force may be necessary." The problem is, he charges, that U.S. targeters don't have good information, and any strike deemed necessary might thus be impotent, inviting retaliation. The only reason I'm privy to this is that Rider is a source for me in updating an early book of mine, Japan's Secret War, about Japan trying to make an atomic bomb in North Korea during World War II. As an expert in North Korean topography and nuclear signatures, he believes, as I do, that North Korea's nuclear program grew out of what the Japanese, who occupied the peninsula during the war, left there after the surrender. In my updating, we've become friends, and he's voiced the targeting problem more than once. With the current threat escalation and his fear that U.S. planners have bad information, Rider decided to try to correct the situation. "I believe North Korea's uranium enrichment program long predates it's rather recent interest in plutonium and other nuclear weapons. I believe North Korea has far more capabilities than our intelligence community believes." Posted by: Anomalous Sources 2017-09-11 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=497035 |