"The Threat Is Real" - Millions In Tokyo Join Nuclear Strike Evacuation Drills

Earlier this week, Hawaii reportedly tested its system of nuclear sirens for the first time since the 1960s as the state’s governor warned that he was taking North Korea’s threats of nuclear annihilation extremely seriously. Today, the Telegraph is reporting that the paranoia has spread to Japan, where millions of Tokyo residents will participate in evacuation drills meant to simulate their response to North Korean nuclear strike.

And Tokyo isn’t the first city to conduct these types of large scale drills: Towns facing the Korean Peninsula have conducted similar drills in recent months.

The national and city governments are to carry out a series of exercises between January and March to prepare for a potential attack on Tokyo, the Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported, the first time that a major Japanese city will have carried out responses to a simulated attack.

 

Towns facing the Korean Peninsula have in recent months conducted similar drills, with residents instructed to seek shelter in response to sirens warning of an imminent missile strike.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has called on local governments throughout the country to identify underground facilities or buildings that are sufficiently sturdy to withstand a missile attack and to designate those facilities as shelters.

Many ordinary Japanese believe the evacuation drills are an important precaution. One Tokyo resident said he participates because he believes that, if North Korea chose to attack, Tokyo would be the logical target.

"I believe the threat is very real and that war could break out at any time", said Ken Kato, a human rights campaigner who lives in Tokyo. Nearly 9.3 million people live in the city, with millions more travelling into the metropolis every day for work.

 

"I also believe that the average Japanese person does not want to think about the worst-case scenario because it is simply too unpleasant, but we cannot keep our heads in the sand any longer", he told The Telegraph.

 

"Evacuation drills are a sensible precaution that would help to minimize casualties, in much the same way as we practice what to do in the event of a major earthquake", he said.

 

"And if war did break out, then I think it is unfortunately inevitable that North Korea would target Tokyo", he added. "The US has a major military base at Yokota, to the west of the city, and its main naval base in the region is at Yokosuka, to the southwest. 

 

"It is hard to believe they would not want to strike those military concentrations," he said, adding that it is unlikely that the North Korean regime would be particularly concerned about casualties among civilians living nearby.

Last week, North Korea launched its ne Hwasong-15 ICBM, the country’s first missile test in more than two months. The missile’s peak height and flight time have led experts to suspect that it could probably strike anywhere on the Continental US – though perhaps not with the highest degree of accuracy.

Like the US, Japan is also at risk of an airburst – the detonation of a nuclear weapon far above the earth’s surface that could knock out the country’s power grid, indirectly killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Heaven Forbid Peace Should Break Out Between The US And North Korea!

Authored by Antonius Aquinas,

As long as the US Empire can be funded and maintained on the backs of its taxpaying public, the chance of de-escalation of tensions not only on the Korean peninsula, but throughout the world are practically nil.  And, as long as the nation’s current interventionist ideology holds sway, it will only be through a financial meltdown that the US’s role as global policeman will come to a much-needed end.

Hamhung, North Korea, June 30, 1950

The most recent example of the world’s biggest bully escalating matters is its on-again, off-again badgering of North Korea.  In contrast to Western/CIA media reports, the November 28 launch of what appears to be an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-15, was not unprovoked.  Instead, the North Korean test firing was in response to the unexpected announcement of further US/South Korean military drills to take place starting on December 4.  The exercises are, in part, to show off the latest mass murdering “product” of America’s military industrial complex, the USF-22 Raptor stealth fighter jet.

Before the latest launch, the Kim Jong Un regime had not fired a missile for two months and was in discussions with other intermediaries about how tensions could be lessened on the Korean peninsula. For the bellicose US, however, not even an uneasy “truce” can be tolerated.  The next American scheduled drill was not to take place until the spring of 2018, yet, while negotiations were taking place, the US abruptly, and to the outrage of everyone involved, renewed exercises.  Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, explains:

We have been working with Pyongyang.  Then, all of a sudden two weeks after the United States had sent us the signal [about readiness to dialogue], they announced unscheduled drills in December.

 

...there is an impression that they were deliberately provoking [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un to make him break the pause and gave in to their provocations.

This, of course, is not the first time that the US has acted with duplicity in foreign matters.  Its barbaric dealing with two Middle Eastern strongmen (Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi) are grisly examples of what happens to those who run afoul of the US Empire, especially those who do not possesses a nuclear deterrent.

North Korea, too, has witnessed the wanton destructive capabilities of the American military during the so called “police action” of the early 1950s:

The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionally greater than that of Japan’s in the Second World War. . . .  

 

American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea . . . including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of WWII.

The loss of life was, to say the least, catastrophic as 10% of the population, some 3 million people, perished due mostly to American bombing while the destruction of property was equally brutal. 

“By the end of the war,” North Korean sources assert, “only two modern buildings remained standing in Pyongyang.”

Is it any wonder that the North Korean leadership gets a little antsy when the US scramble its jets.  It does not want a repetition of the holocaust inflicted on it by the merciless American Air Force.

Of course, these inconvenient facts are rarely if ever spoken about in the Western media, academia, and certainly not by war-mongering politicos like U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley.  They are simply ignorant of history or pretend not to know.

The US Empire only accepts peace if it favors its interests. 

For the Korean Peninsula that means that Kim Jong Un must disband his nuclear program.  Such a move, however, would mean a premature death to Un and the eventual carpet bombing of his country.  The North Korean strongman will do no such thing.

The Trump Administration may huff and puff all it wants and enact greater sanctions on the North, but unless it wants to risk a nuclear confrontation that may spread into a general world war, it has little options.

Instead of another round of destabilizing military maneuvers, maybe President Trump and his foreign policy team should try to engage in genuine negotiations to bring about an equitable solution to the matter.

Why not “give peace a chance?”

Signs Of War: Russian Military Deploys Marines On North Korean Border

Following North Korea’s most recent missile launch are the signs of impending war.  Russia has now deployed Marines to the North Korean border.

Russian marines have begun practicing landing operations at its border with North Korea, following Pyongyang’s controversial missile launch test this week, the military said. Although this is just one of several drills conducted over the past month, more are expected. According to Newsweek, Russian naval infantry servicemen and the crews of Russia’s Pacific Fleet ships Admiral Nevelskoy and Peresvet, carried out a swift, amphibious charge on a beachhead in the Primorye region, Russia’s only one to border North Korea.

The cargo and staff boarded Admiral Nevelskoy at Desantnaya Bay and simulated the landing at the Klerk training range, both of which are in Primorye, Pacific Fleet spokesman Nikolay Voskresenskiy told state-run news agency RIA Novosti. Peresvet made its pickup elsewhere but also arrived in the area near Klerk. -Newsweek

This military drill comes just one day before the Pacific Fleet kicks off a series of training exercises in Primorye and the far more eastern Kamchatka. Those drills will involve around 1,000 troops and over 150 items of equipment. The drills will also involve live fire exercises.

Russia has effectively practiced bombing near the region, paratrooper landings and other maneuvers since September. Each drill, declared separately from any previously announced war games, has come alongside escalating exchanges in the war of words between North Korea and the U.S. Russia has insisted that the U.S. must shoulder part of the blame for stirring the North Korean regime into a frenzy and “provoking” further tests with its ongoing defense commitments to nearby Japan and South Korea. However, Russia has also condemned North Korea’s latest missile launch as well.

Following the launch of their last missile, North Korea claimed that the entire United States is now in the range of one of their missiles. The latest test, purportedly of the North’s new Hwasong-15 missile, was the first one in the last two months sparking concerns that the regime is on the fast-track to obtain even more powerful, and highly advanced weapons.