Bret Stephens isn’t worried about nuclear war for an astonishingly flimsy reason

I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve certainly thought about it, and I’ve had plenty to write about, but I’ve managed to keep myself occupied without putting pixels to LCD. I’m still pretty busy, but I came across something this morning so dumb and so dangerous that self-censorship was no longer an option: I came across Bret Stephens.

Stephens argued in yesterday’s column for the New York Times that NATO’s imposition of a no-fly zone in Ukraine would not risk nuclear war with Russia. I’m not here to comment on the substance of his argument. I’m here to comment on his evidence (emphasis added):

The New York Times still doesn’t really understand the curve it wants to flatten

This morning, the Times misunderstood some coronavirus statistics for the second time in a week. Under the headline Another Problem With the U.S. Virus Response, in a Chart, David Leonhardt identified what he describes as a worrying trend for this country — “a very slow decline from the peak”. Here’s the chart:

Testing basketball players first saved countless lives

The debate over whether sports ball players are overpaid, especially compared to first responders, long predates the outbreak of coronavirus. But the current pandemic has helped highlight which professionals we literally can’t live without.

So maybe it wasn’t the best PR move when, while COVID testing kits were still in extremely short supply (as opposed to just in regular short supply), entire NBA teams managed to get themselves tested. The revelation that the young, fit, and talented were able to secure tests at a time when ordinary people suffering symptoms of the disease — and even medical workers — had trouble doing the same should not have surprised anyone familiar with how this country works, but nevertheless managed to spark widespread outrage.

Personally, I’m fine with it. Of course it’s unseemly, and highlights the glaring need to increase access to affordable healthcare and decrease stark inequalities across the country. But in this case I’m convinced testing the rich and privileged early helped save lives. And as long as the President keeps threatening to reopen the economy by Easter, we’ll need to find as many sick celebrities as possible.

Vox article on the superiority of Canadians includes (at least) one unfortunate blunder

“No doubt aboot it: Canada is better than America in at least 7 ways” crows Sarah Kliff — if that’s her real name — for Vox. The post itself is not all that exciting — except for the sorts of reasons I tend to find the internet exciting: Kliff done goofed, in a deliciously ironic way.

Number 5 of Sarah’s 7 ways has to do with educational  attainment:

The whole world needs to relax about the new North Korean rocket-launch site

The first headline I saw this morning informed me that North Korea recently upgraded its rocket-launch facilities to accommodate, as you might expect, bigger rockets. The Wall Street Journal has more:

Should a decision be made soon to do so in Pyongyang—and we have no evidence that one has—a rocket could be launched by the end of 2014.

Many similar reports focused on the possibility that the site is now better-equipped to attack the United States, as North Korea has expressed interest in doing before:

Oxford just pulled a fast one on Facebook

Late last night, Facebook reported that the Oxford English Dictionary added a number of new words including “vape, listicle and binge-watch”:

Two quick problems with this.

South Korea took exactly the opposite lesson from Israel and Gaza

I wrote last week about the South Koreans who occasionally float Choco Pies over the Korean Demilitarized Zone (“My delicious vision for Israel’s border looks a lot like North & South Korea’s Demilitarized Zone“), and expressed the wish that Israelis and Palestinians might follow the nonviolent example set in that other seemingly-intractable conflict:

My delicious vision for Israel’s border looks a lot like North & South Korea’s Demilitarized Zone

The Qassam rockets were neutralized by Iron Dome. The (known) tunnels have been destroyed, and Israel is busy developing the technology necessary to detect them in the future (or is at the very least now more attuned to the threat). So what fun fruit roll ups diabolical plan will Hamas roll up with next?

I hope Kim Jong-un brushed up on his American geography

North Korea has been threatening the United States with nuclear annihilation for as long as you and I can remember, but a recently-successful nuclear test, a newly-installed leader, and seemingly-specific attack plans have US strategists unsure of the degree to which they must take all this seriously.

The most recent round of threatening exchanges began about three weeks ago, after the UN Security Council agreed unanimously to tighten sanctions in response to North Korea’s third nuclear test. Kang Pyo-yong, the country’s vice defense minister, declared, “If we push the button, they will blast off and their barrage will turn Washington, the stronghold of American imperialists and the nest of evil, and its followers, into a sea of fire.”

I can’t say I lost too much sleep in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. After all, D.C. is probably out of North Korea’s range – the New York Times noted that “North Korea does not have the technical ability to use nuclear-tipped missiles” – and besides, the city is hot and humid and full of Congressmen, so good riddance.

But in the meantime, North Korea supposedly launched massive cyber attacks against its southern neighbor, placed its military on the highest level of alert (presumably, red), and severed its only line of communication with the South Korean military. And the threats haven’t been all one-sided: last week, the United States signed a formal defense agreement obligating it to protect South Korea from even small provocations, and flew B-2 stealth bombers over the country.

And so, we got another round of threats, these much more specific, and — I have to admit — much more worrisome. In any event, it’s probably worth paying attention if only because it’s better not to be taken by surprise in a situation involving the nuclear capabilities of a short man.

Much like in the previous threat, North Korea helpfully provided a list of targets. Kim Jung-un himself is quoted saying that in the event of a US attack, North Korea would “mercilessly strike the US mainland… military bases in the Pacific, including Hawaii and Guam, and those in South Korea.” I count four specific targets on his hit list: Hawaii, Guam, South Korea, and the US Mainland. Which brings us to a game of One of these things is not like the others.

The first three share one feature in common: the targets are entirely in or on the Pacific Ocean, just like North Korea. In other words, Kim’s list makes a lot of sense: Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles must be able to travel 1000 miles before they can travel 2000 miles, so as North Korea continues to develop its rocket technology, some targets are sure to come in range before others. That the targets are so specific and relatively nearby — and not, say, Detroit, New York, and Miami — might lend some credence to Kim Jung-un’s threat.

But what of the Thing that is not like the others — that is, the threat to hit the US mainland? Just last week, North Korea got a lot of attention when it released a photo with a map in the background detailing a “US Mainland Strike Plan”, so you know at least someone is taking the possibility seriously:

Did this computer game shut down the internet across an entire country?

Recent coverage of cyberwarfare has focused largely on the battle raging between the United States-based corporations & its government, and a shadow unit of elite Chinese military hackers. But lest the world’s attention shift too far from the egos of petulant dictators, news of intrigue from the homepeninsula of PSY:

Police and South Korean officials were investigating the simultaneous shutdown Wednesday of computer networks at several major broadcasters and banks. While the cause wasn’t immediately clear, speculation centered on a possible North Korean cyberattack.

There are good reasons to blame the shutdown on North Korea:

The shutdown came days after North Korea blamed South Korea and the United States for cyberattacks that temporarily shut down websites in Pyongyang.

Tensions between the neighboring countries are high following North Korea’s recent nuclear test and U.N. sanctions that followed.

But when you take a moment to examine the evidence, that explanation sort of falls apart:

The Reuters news agency reports that South Korean government investigators haven’t found any evidence yet of an external cyberattack.

Reuters also reports that a major Internet service provider, LG Uplus, says it believes its network has been hacked.

And since when do North Koreans even have computers anyway??

So while the investigation is ongoing, I’ll take this opportunity to explain exactly what I think is going on, and it has nothing to do with cyberwarfare waged by North Korea — or anyone else.

In fact, I would suggest that South Korea is suffering from a unique species of “denial of service”-like attack that also happened to recently afflict a large number of cities in the United States.

I have extensive expertise in computer hackery (in that I am a hack who writes on a computer), so my suggestion that the technique employed in South Korea was “denial of service” has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it is the only type of hack I could name off the top of my head. My explanation is, at the very least,  plausible — so bear with me. According to Wikipedia, from whence my detailed knowledge of DoS attacks:

A “denial-of-service” attack is characterized by an explicit attempt by attackers to prevent legitimate users of a service from using that service. There are two general forms of DoS attacks: those that crash services and those that flood services.

The attack in South Korea has been characterized as a “shutdown”, so we’ll assume it was the type that involves crashing (as opposed to flooding) services.

Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways, and even root nameservers.

I don’t know what a root nameserver is (nor do I care enough to click on the helpfully-provided link), but the attack we’re dealing with did affect high-profile web servers, including banks, so: so far so good.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, so much so that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered essentially unavailable.

This final piece of information is the one crucial to my analysis.

Consider what we know: a bank and a broadcaster and an internet service provider in South Korea reported that their networks shut down. Such network shutdowns can occur when machines are saturated by “external communications requests.” Such requests could come as part of a coordinated attack — or they could come as part of an uncoordinated deluge.

And when do South Koreans uncoordinatedly deluge banks, broadcasters, and internet service providers?

Well, just last week, I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out and were suddenly silenced. It was the sound of millions of South Koreans getting their hands on this  for the first time — and suddenly ceasing to engage in the pretense of social interaction: