Hunting for North Korean Fiber Optic Cables

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.

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.

China was already sending troops and material to the front lines when MacArthur was ordered to stand down. Pushing further would have meant a hot war with China.

A hot war with China in 1950 was going to end quickly with the firepower USA had on-hand.

North Korea is a buffer state and continues to exist because of China.

Think how many tens of millions would have died in such a war. Just for some other evil to pop up anyway.

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.

Wow, just half a dozen comments from why we're not saving North Koreans to "we could've nuked China and solved a lot of problems."

Some Hacker News threads are on their own level.

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.

In what way?

The US nearly lost the Korean war.

The US army was nearly overrun at least once.

The US airforce never achieved air superiority, and Soviet aircraft were better in most ways.

The only undisputed advantage the US had was nukes, which is why MacArthur wanted to use them tactically (!)

You know the US destroyed nearly 75 percent of all buildings in North Korea during the Korean War, right?

NK is paranoid for very valid reasons.

You mean when Churchill wanted to hire 100,000 "former" Nazis to invade the Soviet Union?

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 to starve them and failed.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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?

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.

It was way too late, look up Operation Unthinkable.

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.

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.

Is this how we are to attribute atrocities? Where does the buck stop?

> why nobody ever did anything about the incredible atrocities that took place in that country for decades.

Why in that country ? US controls much of western opinion and made a lot of atrocities, yet, nobody cares (see the ongoing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_military_st... )

It doesn't.

The subsequent Vietnam war reinforced this even more.

The only path that America had to win in Vietnam was to destroy it, including the population they were allegedly there to protect. Hence they lost.

What makes 1950s Korea evil? You are equating North Korea today with Korea of 75 years ago, they aren't even remotely similar. You don't think your nation getting bombed to literal fields of rubble wouldn't change views and political stances afterwards?

Unification was supported by both sides among the people, most South Koreans supported communism and 70% of them supported unification with the North. South Koreans didn't even support their own government, they were dealing with internal insurrection from their own people. The North was an industrialized nation and the South was a poor farming country and their unification would of been hugely beneficial to both. The war would have been over in another 2 weeks without intervention and a minimal amount of casualties, and it had only been 3 months from the start of the invasion. The only people not in support of it at the time was the political leaders of SK at the time because it meant they personally as individuals would lose power and wealth, and the US who was on a crusade to crush and kill anybody who dared support communism. Korea never should have been split in the first place, but the US and USSR had to be little bitches and force their will upon these people.

Killing 5 million people, most of which were innocent civilians, in the name of "fighting communism" is evil, not the idea of a unified nation of people supported by those same people.

If anybody gave a fuck about the Korean people they wouldn't have split Korea up to start with, they wouldn't have stopped the reunification of Korea, and they wouldn't have bombed millions of civilians to death.

When Japan was bombed, nobody else in the world had nuclear weapons, the US only had 2, and there were only a handful of people outside of the US seriously researching nuclear weapons and were still years away from a test. By 1950 the USSR had working nuclear bombs, had proven so with a nuclear test, and a dozen other countries had started their own nuclear weapons programs.

Wait - you think the solution to some people having a lower standard of living and others being persecuted is to kill them all?

It's different almost by definition?

Because it was a once (twice!) off the impact and significance of it is amplified.

Worth pointing out that South Korea had very limited democracy until the late 1980s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea

> What makes 1950s Korea evil?

Soviet occupation. Korea was supposed to be unified and elect a government back in 1950, Soviets made sure it didn't happen because they had no chance of winning.

That and, you know, the whole invasion thing.

Any proof of your emotional statements? Order of scale of those civilian deaths contradicts literally every public statistics out there.

You seem to have... very strong while also contrarian opinions in this thread to be polite, leaning heavily into apologist position for North Korean government

wtf

People scoff at North Korean propaganda.[1] Then they turn around and say this with a straight face.

America bombed North Korea back to the stone age. Now we in the West wonder why it’s so F’d up by its very own volition.

[1]: This is not to say that North Korean propaganda is not real.

Nukes usually don't wipe out entire countries, especially tactical nukes.

I'm far from convinced that using nukes in the Korean War would've been a good move, but equating it with "kill[ing] them all" is completely dishonest. What's your goal in this debate, and is it served by dishonest rhetoric?

The North Korean government is trash, but that doesn't mean I gotta ignore the plights and opinions of Koreans 75 years ago or pretend that bombing them to rubble was somehow a good thing because today they are lead by a despot. Millions of people didn't deserve to die just because the US had a dumb ideological crusade against communism when the vast majority of people in Korea supported it.

So it was evil because the soviets supported the North? Because communism?

Pretty sure the soviets were perfectly fine with the North taking the South considering the South was US aligned which gave the US a foothold right on their doorstep. And again, the vast majority of Korean people on both sides supported Korean unification. The South Korean leadership, which was basically appointed by the US for their pro-US and anti-communism stance, was so unpopular among South Koreans that there was civilian insurrectionists trying to topple it. The South Korean military upon invasion couldn't even keep its own troops from deserting in significant numbers, and they even blew up a bridge full of refuges to try and stop the advance which it failed to do.

Yes the North invaded which is generally bad, but they did do it with popular sentiment among the people, and they weren't attacking and killing civilians along the way.

And regardless of all that, none of that justifies the US response of bombing and killing millions of civilians and leveling entire cities. The Korean War is considered the most deadly war in Asia ever, and had far higher percentage of civilian casualties than WWII and Vietnam.

Funny you should ask, but yes, communism is evil. Whenever somebody promises a classless society you can be sure they're about to enslave, kill and torture people in great numbers.

I guess if I have to explain it I might as well not bother.

A key feature of liberal democracy over the pre-existing aristocratic oligarchies was providing a classless society (which, superficially, as classes were defined under aristocratic systems, it does.)

The entire analysis of capitalism which articulated the class system with which it replaced that of the pre-existing aristocracy and revealed the elimination of class to actually just be a switch in its structure and elevation of a new ruling class was by Communists.

Liberalism means no state-enforced classes but doesn't promise forcing everyone into the same class. Commies promise the latter, but in fact enforce a class structure of their own.

My comment is in the context of:

> That USA didn't nuke China in 1950 or 1951. Would have solved a lot of problems for generations of people.

> USA dropping nukes probably would have been the better outcome for humanity.

Both of which I read as an expansive campaign of "nuking China"

Grow an "ender" first. And when you do try - keep in mind that many tried before you. The Swedes. The French. The Germans. They all got their comeuppance, and so will you.