Hunger Coming To Korea

There has been an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in South Korea.

The severe foot and mouth epidemic that started in South Korea at the end of November could have even more serious repercussions for public health. Some 3m head of livestock have already been slaughtered but now the environment ministry is concerned about burial of the carcasses.

Under the pressure of events some cattle were buried alive and the authorities sometimes failed to take the necessary precautions: digging pits four or five metres deep and lining them with two layers of plastic sheeting. Farm animals were buried at more than 4,000 sites, often in easily accessible spots, for instance beside rivers.

As spring temperatures rise the corpses will start to rot. Rainfall leaching through the pits, above all during the June monsoon, could contaminate rivers and aquifers. This could be a hazard for drinking water with the risk of another outbreak of foot and mouth disease. To prevent "an unprecedented environmental disaster" the environment minister Lee Maanee last week called for "a full, detailed study of all the [burial] sites before spring".

According to a survey carried out in the eastern province of North Gyeongsang, where the epidemic started, more than one in 10 burial sites needs to be reinforced. New pits may be dug and lined with concrete.

The new problem comes on top of those posed by the epidemic itself, which has already cost South Korea 2,000bn won ($1.75bn) and pushed up food prices. The price of pork rose by nearly 12% in January alone. With about 5% of beef and dairy cattle having been destroyed the authorities are afraid there may be milk shortages, production having dropped by as much as one-fifth in some places.

Could it infect humans? Yes but it is rare.

Because FMD rarely infects humans, but spreads rapidly among animals, it is a much greater threat to the agriculture industry than to human health. Farmers around the world can lose huge amounts of money during a foot-and-mouth epizootic, when large numbers of animals are destroyed and revenues from milk and meat production go down.

And there are animal vaccines. It is looking bad for South Korea. But at least they have resources to buy their way out of the problem.

North Korea is in worse shape although the infection has not spread so far there.

SEOUL—A swiftly moving disease that has decimated South Korean livestock and damaged the country's food production now appears to be out of control in North Korea.

It is unclear where or when the latest outbreak of the airborne, easily transported illness known as foot-and-mouth disease began on the Korean peninsula. But in a sign of the pressure North Korea is facing over the issue, its state media on Tuesday reported that the outbreak originated in the South and that other countries, including Malaysia and Mongolia, have been hit with outbreaks in the past.

North Korea, which faces chronic food shortages and whose authoritarian government resists interaction with outsiders, hasn't taken any apparent steps to cull animals infected with the disease, as South Korea did.

Visitors to North Korea reported as far back as December they suspected the country was battling foot-and-mouth disease, but North Korea's state news agency didn't officially confirm the outbreak until Thursday when it said "more than 10,000 head of draft oxen, milk cows and pigs have been infected" and "thousands of them died."

In addition to reducing the North's already-constrained food supply, the disease's spread to oxen, widely used in place of tractors there, will limit the ability of North Korean farmers to carry out planting and other tasks.

And of course China, which borders North Korea is at risk. This is going to cause a spike in food prices world wide.

The rich countries will be stressed. Many of the poor countries of the world will be broken. Add in the recent freezes in in the US and Mexico and the world food supply is going to be strained severely. And yet the Delta Smelt has shut down a lot of food production in California (brilliant that) and we are using vast acreage to turn corn into alcohol. You have to wonder if the people running the show in America were born stupid or did they have to take classes?

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Wars And Rumors Of War

Will there be a reopening of the war between North and South Korea soon? Some people think so.

In Moscow's bleakest assessment of the situation on the Korean peninsula yet, Russian deputy foreign minister Alexei Borodavkin said tensions between the two countries were running at their highest and most dangerous level in a decade.

"Tensions on the Korean Peninsula could not be any higher. The only next step is a conflict," he told foreign policy experts at a round table on the subject in Moscow.

His prediction came two months after North Korea vowed to wage "a sacred war" against South Korea and its biggest backer, the United States.

And that is not the only hot spot that could erupt. Japan and China are not exactly on the friendliest of terms these days.

The USS Hawaii, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, arrived earlier this month at Yokosuka, home port of the U.S. Seventh Fleet, one more asset in America’s naval buildup in Northeast Asia, which can be viewed as a direct result of Chinese assertions of hegemony over the East China and South China Seas.

In July three Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines surfaced more or less simultaneously at Pusan, South Korea, Subic Bay in the Philippines and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The three are converted Trident missile submarines, having been stripped of their intercontinental ballistic missiles and stuffed with Tomahawk cruise missiles - 140 per sub – armed with conventional warheads.

The Hawaii is part of new class of attack submarines that are configured to operate in shallow, near-shore waters. As the submarine’s captain was happy to tell the Pacific Stars and Stripes newspaper on arrival, the sub has the ability to maintain a “persistent presence off shallow waters.”

It is nice to have a strong American President in office during these troubled times. Ah. Oh? Well never mind. Which reminds me: Miss Me Yet?

Don't forget to put up your down payment for the next gang of rascals come this November. And do not forget. If you choose unwisely in November you will have another chance to correct your error in 2012. Because, we are Americans and we can vote them out.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Cultural Maintenance

Now here is a story about a country that is serious about protecting its culture.

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean prosecutors on Wednesday demanded a popular actress who tried to overturn the country's law that criminalizes adultery be thrown in jail for a year and a half for having an affair, local media reported.

South Korean enacted its adultery law more than 50 years ago to protect women who had few rights in the male-dominated society but critics say now it is a draconian measure no longer fit for a country with an advanced civil and family court system.

Actress Ok So-ri's case has created a sensation in South Korea after she admitted to an affair with a singer and called on the country's Constitutional Court to overturn the statute that can send a person to jail for up to two years for adultery.

The first rule when dealing with any court is to never admit anything.

Ok's lawyers were also not immediately available for comment but they have said in a petition to Constitutional Court: "The adultery law ... has degenerated into a means of revenge by the spouse, rather than a means of saving a marriage."

Last month, the Constitutional Court said adultery damaged the social order and therefore was a criminal offence.

I wonder if Liz Taylor movies were ever popular in South Korea? That was one busy lady in her prime.

Joining the Club

There has been an interesting discussion going on over at LGF about nuke weapons. The discussion was prompted by this Tech Central Station article.

My comments:

I love nuke stuff. So much so that I was a Naval Nuke. A rod yanker so to speak.

About five or eight years ago we shipped 20 TONS of plutonium to Japan. In theory the Japanese were going to "dispose" of it in a specially designed reactor. Right.

BTW that is enough Pu for at minimum 1,000 weapons. (more like 8,000 actually)

So I'd add Japan to the nuclear club for the same reason Israel is in the club. Material and know how.

The #1 reason for China to put the brakes on the Norks is the knowledge that the Japanese are an unannounced nuclear power.

It seems to me that the Nork's testing of rockets by sending them in the direction of Japan is very unwise. For the Norks.

Europe has been sending nuclear material to Japan for some time. Greenpeace made their usual stink about the danger. If they only knew.

You can't ship big chunks (not over a pound likely per container). The container needs to be large enough and strong enough to keep it away from other chunks despite colision, fire, and a flooding hold. And that is just the obvious stuff.

Here is an article on the shipments from 1999. Straight from the horses mouth Greenpeace.

Weapns grade plutonium shipments to Japan.

And it was 40 tons total not twenty. i.e. Japan is now a world class nuclear power with a weapons capability second only to the USA.

The initial shipment was 450 kg said to be enough for 50 bombs. (more like 200 if well designed and fusion boosted)

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The US Japanese nuclear co-operation goes back further than I thought. It could have been policy since Regan.

The U.S.-Japan agreement provides for the shipment of plutonium extracted from spent fuel rods removed from Japanese commercial reactors. The origin of the fuel rods is the United States. The agreement requires Japan to notify the United States State Department before each transfer of plutonium and to provide the United States with a transportation plan that includes a "threat assessment and a contingency plan."

American Plutonium shipments to Japan

The General Accounting Office, Congress' auditor, has weighed in with its report on the first shipment of plutonium to Japan made under the 1988 Agreement for Cooperation Between the United States and Japan Concerning Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy. Senator John Glenn, chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, asked the GAO to prepare the report, which was released in June 1993.

You have to scroll about half way down the page for the Japan stuff.

Interestingly enough South Korea is doing the reprocessing.

No wonder they do not see the Northern Nuke as such a threat. That would explain a lot.

Looks to me like if you are a reliable ally America will provide nuclear materials.

My guess is that all of the major Asian powers in the American orbit are nuclear armed.

That seems to be policy.

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So how hard is it to design and build a weapon?

My understanding of modern plutonium based nuclear weapons is that they are all thermonuclear.

Our initial designs were developed with computers that had less power than a TRS-80. The lowest cost desktop machine of today is at minimum 1,000 times as powerful. Which says that the computations that would take a year in 1950 could be done in 8 hours or less today. And of course if you wanted to do paper tests faster of different designs just buy more computers.

FabioC adds a link to a modern nuke weapon with general design outlines, history, and lots of general guidelines for bomb design. More is easily found on the www. And there are links galore at the site.

How hard is it to design and build a nuke? You give me the Pu (say a couple of ounces accurately machined). 1,000 or 2,000 smoke detectors (to make a neutron source).

A NC machine tool capable of holding .0001" tolerance over a 5" distance (not too exotic these days). An interferometer based measuring tool.

Some test eqpt. o-scopes capable of recording around 1E9 samples a second ( again not too exotic these days).

Some test eqpt. (x-ray detectors, neutron dectectors etc)

I could work out all the required constants.

From there I buy an optics and a mechanical dynamics program and I'm off and running.

With really top notch people (don't forget this stuff was originally done with slide rules, IBM punch card machines capable of about ten calculations a second, and vacuum tubes. Feynman ran the IBM machine. It is a fascinating story.) I could get by with an eqpt budget of $20 to $40 million. Peanuts really.

The codes even done in Basic ought not be too hard. Or if you want to get really fancy Mathematica. Some one who understood x-ray grazing optics optics, stress/strain curves, partial differentials and cubic splines ought to do the trick. You go to a university and find the best politically motivated engineers and mathematicians. A team of five ought to be more than adequate. Did I mention that you need an explosive forming expert?

The reason such a big team was needed for the first one was the uncertainty and the lack of off the shelf eqpt. Everything was custom. Now a days all you pay for is the marginal cost. The R&D has already been done.

Now my training was in reactors. Weapons were mentioned in passing only from the standpoint of critical mass. But almost any engineer from open sources could figure out the requirements. Or just go to any good history of Los Alamos. (I have none to suggest).