https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53060620 >North Korea has blown up a joint liaison office with the South near the North's border town of Kaesong.
I'm not going to be surprised if everything from now on is just a continual spiral to shit.
>>25932 I don't expect to come of this; Kim Jong Un's sister it trying to make herself look powerful if/when she takes over as leader and having a pop at the South Koreans seems to be the default setting for this.
To be honest, if groups of lads can full on murder one-another with stones and iron bars but nobody fires a shot in self-defence then I think the orders from above are pretty clear.
I hope the Indian and Chinese leaderships can agree that all contests must be fought in dance-offs. Or maybe a cook-off.
>>25950 They're on different ends of the taste spectrum if you ask me. Chinese food has too many sweet dishes even when compared with the land of chutney.
>>25953 Katsu is Japanese. Different kettle of fish.
>>25931 China and India don't actively despise each other on the same level as India and laplanderstan do and no nukes have flown there yet, so I doubt this will precipitate a WW3 esque conflict.
The ceasefire will end eventually, but I doubt it will be Chinese troops that break it.
>>25976 These were common in the days of the Sino-Soviet border dispute. Every winter lads from either side would meet on frozen lakes and knock the shit out of each other with crude weapons.
You would think in the decades since they would have specialised kit for the job but I guess you can't improve on perfection.
Plausible deniability innit. The 1996 agreement prohibits the use of military force within the border exclusion zone, but the use of crude improvised weapons allows both sides to pretend that the fighting isn't officially sanctioned.
>China’s military used microwave weapons to force Indian troops to retreat during a months-long border standoff in the Himalayas, according to an account that has emerged in Beijing.
>Its forces had turned two strategic hilltops that had been occupied by Indian soldiers ‘into a microwave oven’, forcing them to retreat and allowing the positions to be retaken without an exchange of conventional fire, according to Jin Canrong, a professor of international relations at Beijing-based Renmin University.
>In a lecture he said that the People’s Liberation Army “beautifully” seized the ground without violating a no-live-shot rule governing the rules of engagement in the high-altitude standoff between the two Asian powers. Microwave weapons focus high frequency electro-magnetic pulses or beams at targets and cause irritation and pain by heating up any human tissue in its way.
>“We didn’t publicise it because we solved the problem beautifully,” Mr Jin said. “They [India] didn’t publicise it, either, because they lost so miserably.” The professor said that Chinese troops fired the weapon from the bottom of the hills and “turned the mountain tops into a microwave oven”. “In 15 minutes, those occupying the hilltops all began to vomit,” he said. “They couldn’t stand up, so they fled. This was how we retook the ground.”
>>28868 Been waiting for these weapons to become more mainstream. The instances in the US from years back should've set off alarm bells for everyone, it's only going to get worse.
>It's mad that this is the kind of conflict and diplomacy that is happening in current year between two international superpowers.
It has to have a veneer of deniability to higher ups otherwise they might have to have a proper war, the tactic is to inch things in a way that is not worth commenting on, and through all those small gains make a meaningful one.
It isn't unusual, I forget which ex-soviet republic it was but they have people standing guard with machine guns all across the border 24/7 because when they didn't the Russians would come in the middle of the night moved a bunch of fence posts and annexed the land.
>>28869 It's a breach of General Assembly resolutions on directed energy weapons against personnel which I suspect is the real reason China didn't announce it. The particular prohibition I have in mind is against weapons that inflict suffering. Assuming China gives a rats arse about international law.
Funnily enough you can ramp it up to instantly incinerate personnel though so no need to pack away the death ray, lads.
Announcing that they did this at the Indian Border basically confirms that this tech was used in the case of the Havana syndrome stuff that was reported in 2017, right?
Havana Syndrome couldn't have been caused by microwaves, because microwave frequencies are strongly attenuated by walls. To cause a noticeable effect from outside the building, you'd need hundreds of kilowatts of RF. That amount of energy is not subtle - anything conductive in the area would be fizzing and crackling with arcs.
>>28879 How do we know they don't have something that works around this? These weapons are at least 10 years old now, the US definitely has something more advanced especially considering they have something to deploy to protect against directed energy weapons.
>>28880 We don't, but how does that confirm that one event with one set of symptoms was done by the same thing as caused a completely different set of symptoms?
>A social media post from an account linked to the Chinese Communist Party has sparked controversy for appearing to mock India over its coronavirus crisis. The post on Chinese site Weibo showed an image of a rocket launch in China alongside a photo of the bodies of Covid victims being cremated in India. Text with it read: "Lighting a fire in China VS lighting a fire in India."
>The post, which appeared on Saturday afternoon, has since been deleted. It was reportedly published by an account belonging to an official Chinese law enforcement agency - the Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission - which has millions of followers on Weibo, a popular microblogging site in the country.
>>33495 >The west lighting a fire and then being asked about said fire
>>33497 This does bring up the broader point for me on the Indo-Pacific tilt that you still get that assumption that India will somehow counter-balance China if we pump it up. In reality the country is a mess more in need of basic developmental assistance and when it does have any strength it uses it to advance causes like Hindu-nationalism rather than supporting international stability.
The whole mode of thinking seems broken, China is a monster because we made it a monster with globalisation and our idea of counter-balancing the USSR made that okay.
China tests new space capability with hypersonic missile
China tested a nuclear-capable hypersonic missile in August that circled the globe before speeding towards its target, demonstrating an advanced space capability that caught US intelligence by surprise. Five people familiar with the test said the Chinese military launched a rocket that carried a hypersonic glide vehicle which flew through low-orbit space before cruising down towards its target.
The missile missed its target by about two-dozen miles, according to three people briefed on the intelligence. But two said the test showed that China had made astounding progress on hypersonic weapons and was far more advanced than US officials realised. The test has raised new questions about why the US often underestimated China’s military modernisation.
The US, Russia and China are all developing hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles that are launched into space on a rocket but orbit the earth under their own momentum. They fly at five times the speed of sound, slower than a ballistic missile. But they do not follow the fixed parabolic trajectory of a ballistic missile and are manoeuvrable, making them harder to track. Taylor Fravel, an expert on Chinese nuclear weapons policy who was unaware of the test, said a hypersonic glide vehicle armed with a nuclear warhead could help China “negate” US missile defence systems which are designed to destroy incoming ballistic missiles.
“Hypersonic glide vehicles . . . fly at lower trajectories and can manoeuvre in flight, which makes them hard to track and destroy,” said Fravel, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Fravel added that it would be “destabilising” if China fully developed and deployed such a weapon, but he cautioned that a test did not necessarily mean that Beijing would deploy the capability.
Mounting concern about China’s nuclear capabilities comes as Beijing continues to build up its conventional military forces and engages in increasingly assertive military activity near Taiwan.