Obama Used Cyberattacks To Sabotage North Korean Launches For Years
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Mar 4, 2017
Long before Kim Jong-Un launched his latest ballistic missile test in February, prompting an angry response from not only the US, Japan and various other countries, most notably China, which banned North Korean coal imports in retaliation and unleashed what may be a political crisis in Pyongyang, former president Barack Obama was already engaged in a cyberwar with North Korea.
According to the NYT, three years ago Obama ordered Pentagon officials to step up their cyber-strikes against North Korea’s missile program in order to sabotage missile test launches in their opening seconds. That explains why shortly after various North Korean launches, a large number of the country’s military rockets began to explode, veer off course, disintegrate in midair and plunge into the sea, as detailed here on various occasions.
While advocates of such efforts believe that targeted attacks have given American antimissile defenses a new edge and delayed by several years the day when North Korea will be able to threaten American cities with nuclear weapons launched atop intercontinental ballistic missiles, other experts have grown increasingly skeptical of the new approach, arguing that manufacturing errors, disgruntled insiders and sheer incompetence can also send missiles awry. In other words, something is causing the crashes, but US cyberspies is just one of the possible factors.
Making matters more complex, over the past eight months, they note, the North has managed to successfully launch three medium-range rockets. And Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, now claims his country is in “the final stage in preparations” for the inaugural test of his intercontinental missiles — perhaps a bluff, perhaps not, according to the NYT.
According to the NYT, which cites an examination of the Pentagon’s disruption effort, based on interviews with officials of the Obama and Trump administrations the United States still does not have the ability to effectively counter the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Those threats are far more resilient than many experts thought, The New York Times’s reporting found, “and pose such a danger that Mr. Obama, as he left office, warned President Trump that they would likely be the most urgent problem he would confront.”
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