US demands China cut off oil to North Korea or the US will

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U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said China must stop exporting crude to North Korea, or “we can take the oil situation into our own hands.”

“The dictator of North Korea made a choice yesterday that brings the world closer to war, not farther from it,” Haley said. “We have never sought war with North Korea, and still today we do not seek it. If war does come, it will be because of continued acts of aggression like we witnessed yesterday.”

“And if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed,” she added.

Haley requested the emergency meeting with her counterparts from South Korea and Japan shortly after North Korea’s launch on Tuesday.

China shipments of oil to North Korea

China announced in September it would reduce shipments of refined petroleum products to North Korea to 2 million barrels per year. Last year, China sent 6,000 barrels of oil products per day to North Korea necessary to keep its agriculture, transportation and military sectors running, according to the U.S. Energy Administration.

China continues to send North Korea crude oil, the raw input for fuels like gasoline and diesel. China ships an estimated 10,000 barrels per day to North Korea’s only operating refinery near the Chinese border, EIA says.

The Latest North Korea missile launch was a still more advanced mimssile

Analysts generally agree that the Hwasong-15 marks a significant leap forward in North Korea’s missile development.

If the Hwasong-15 was fitted with a half-ton payload and flown on a standard trajectory, it could probably fly about 5,300 miles, Elleman wrote for 38 North, a website devoted to North Korea, meaning that a 600 kilogram (1,320 pound) payload “barely reaches Seattle.”

2 thoughts on “US demands China cut off oil to North Korea or the US will”

  1. There are no compelling reasons for China to starve the DPRK into submission to Trump.
    No country in the region wants a senseless war. The DPRK position on the missile launch states that the only purpose of the nuclear program is as a deterrent to prevent an attack by the U.S. The threat to totally destroy the DPRK implies that Korean lives matter little. There are no viable deterrents to such a threat short of being able to counter an attack by hitting the U.S. itself.
    S. Korea does not want war if its security can be guaranteed. A plausible outcome is that S. Korea propose that it would accept withdrawal of American forces if the UN would guarantee its security against attack from the DPRK as a condition for dismantling the DPRK nuclear program. China and Russia would back such a proposal. Trump could claim victory that he got the DPRK to abandon its nuclear program and DPRK could claim success with withdrawal of American forces. Since Trump had promised this during the campaign his base would also approve.
    The DPRK could redirect its missile program to produce spacecraft in cooperation with China.

  2. This is the kind of thing that “doesn’t end well”, if the stance of neither the Norks nor the US doesn’t change. Yet… as I game this a bit (mathematically!) it appears that nuclear weapons need not be involved for the US to do exactly what it says: “take oil matters into our own hands” (paraphrased).

    Non-nuclear RBMs¹ could ‘get er done’ pretty handily. We now have meter-level targeting resolution. We also probably have never-used-in-war but remarkable super-fragmentation bombs that are “pipeline destroyers”. Never confirmed. Stupid-easy to make. Instead of 2 to 3 tons of TNT and 0.5 T or less of casing, the opposite. 2–3 tons of geometrically scored tungsten with a ton or less of HE.².

    The tungsten having very high tensile strength dutifully ruptures along all the pre made seams. The resulting large / heavy / compact shrapnel are accelerated to high-supersonic velocity. Indeed the whole exterior can be a “shaped charge array”. Thousands of ’em. The blobs of hypervelocity plasma in turn wreak enormous havoc with sturdy things like pipes and pipelines.

    The problem (for the pipeline owner) then becomes fixing it. Its leaking thousands of barrels of flammables. The fire itself takes days to put out. The repair is anything but simple. New sections of pipe, almost always custom-manufactured, need making. Then transport to the site. Then welding onto the remaining sections.

    And the problem “yet again” is that a month later when the pipe is recharged, the aggressor can send another bomb. To another section of pipe.

    Kind of a pipeline “denial-of-service attack”. The oil can be made not to flow. The entire network turns out to be vulnerable in the same way. Refineries, don’t like holes punched thru them. Storage tanks, similarly. Oil, petrol, storage, delivery all require a lot of storage. Hard-to-harden storage. Hard to hide, too.

    With modern somewhat secret high-n-long loiter RADAR cloaked surveillance, we can now get a continuous stream of up-to-the-minute fresh photography of huge swathes of the area. If a convoy of large mobile tankers takes over, they too can be “DoS clipped”. The embargo of motor-fuels is fairly easy to ensure.

    Likewise, the DoS of airspace is also fairly straight-forward to attain then maintain. Drones, smart-bombs, runway-ruiners, air-traffic RADAR destruction, radio jamming, … it works. No dogfights needed. Not that they would work anyway.

    If the NORKs continue on their self-destructive path, then there’s DoS of power. Ridiculously easy to do in nondestructive ways. Clouds of graphite powder at sub-stations. Shorts everything out, breakers break, no power until completely cleaned up. Days. Repeat. Weeks. Repeat. Months.

    Point is, that the regime can be broken. We’ve got the toys, the experience (Iraq), the means (military), the willpower (a hard-nosed, no-nonsense president). The United Nations appears to be behind us. All’s well.

    GoatGuy

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