Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott on Monday warned an audience of a threat to the Lone Star state far greater than those from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: Democrats.

Abbott made his comments at a McLennan County Republican Club lunchtime event in Waco, TX, using the venue to repeatedly slam the Obama administration’s policies. In doing so, Abbott took the time to warn his fellow Republicans of the encroaching threat that Democrats pose to their very way of life. Pointing to the group Battleground Texas, composed of veterans of the Obama presidential campaigns, the Abbott argued that the Democratic Party is a far greater concern to the state than North Korea:

“One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons,” Abbott said. “The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration and his political machine.”

Austin was one of the cities seen on a North Korean map, supposedly comprising the targets should North Korea carry out nuclear strikes in the United States. North Korea’s vast supply of missiles, however, are unable to reach that far, whether or not they are able to be nuclear-armed.

Meanwhile, Battleground Texas is seeking to convince Texans to vote for Democrats in national elections. Speaking to the Waco Tribune after the speech, Abbott said “he made the comparison to North Korea partly because he doesn’t think the country is a serious threat to the U.S.” and to highlight that “complacency kills” in politics.
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Republicans in Congress came out swinging against what they label as the Obama administration’s cuts to military spending in its new budget, specifically citing the threat North Korea’s missiles pose as a reason to preserve missile defense spending. A close read of the Pentagon’s weapon procurement plans, however, show an increase in spending to the missile defense programs most closely related to countering North Korea.

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) made headlines on Thursday when he inadvertently revealed a still secret Defense Intelligence Agency asessment of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. In one segment of the DIA’s assessment, which was mistakenly labeled as unclassified in the copy provided to Congress, the Pentagon spy agency determined North Korea “has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles; however, the reliability will be low.”

Lamborn defended the disclosure after the meeting, as he was worried that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to fund missile defense:

“My whole goal in bringing this to light was to make sure we don’t cut missile defense spending,” the congressman said. “At the worst possible time, the President’s budget does exactly that.”

Republicans like Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA), Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Randy Forbes (R-VA) also seized on the North Korean crisis to attack the Obama administration’s proposed Fiscal Year 2014 budget on Friday — despite the fact that baseline spending is actually up by $1 billion. And while missile defense spending is cut $550 million in the President’s proposal, those cuts are primarily due to cancelling the Medium Extended Air Defense System, which the Pentagon has said it doesn’t want. In fact, Lamborn’s specific worry so far as it relates to North Korea is concerned is demonstrably false.

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A handful of media outlets are reporting news that Dick Cheney is now warning that the United States is in “deep doo doo” regarding its relations with North Korea.

Of course the reclusive communist regime has been doing a lot of saber rattling in recent weeks and that does indeed pose challenges for the United States. But as interesting as it is to report a comparison of the situation on the Korean peninsula to dog droppings, what’s really news here is not what Cheney said, it’s who he said it to, the Hill reports:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney discussed tensions on the Korean peninsula with Republican leaders in Congress in a closed-door meeting Tuesday, warning them that the United States was in danger. [...]

The former vice president spoke to GOP lawmakers, at the invitation of Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

Top House Republicans turning to the former vice president — behind closed doors — to give foreign policy advice to the GOP caucus sounds a lot like what Mitt Romney had to do during last year’s campaign: solicit Cheney’s wisdom and money, but don’t let too many people know about it. And there’s good reason: the American people don’t like him, mainly because his ideas and policies are unpopular and have been completely discredited.

But the crowd loved it. “We appreciate the vice president for sharing his insight and experience on the matter,” a McCarthy aid said. Rep. Steve Southerland (R-FL) said Cheney — who was apparently also wearing a cowboy hat — “looked really good, spoke really clearly, lucidly.”

Cheney reportedly tried to shed some light on what North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is up to by harking back to his days of dealing with (but really not actually knowing anything about) Saddam Hussein, noting “you never know what they’re thinking.” Indeed. (Apparently Cheney bringing up his history with Saddam Hussein didn’t set off red flags with this particular group of Republicans.)

Back in 2002, then-Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) had said on numerous occasions that he did not think the Bush administration had made a strong enough case for the U.S. to invade Iraq. The White House needed Armey or, it was thought, the war authorization from Congress would fall apart. So before the vote, Cheney reportedly met privately with Armey and told him that he had sound intelligence he couldn’t discuss publicly because it was so horrifying: that Hussein had direct ties to al Qaeda and that Iraq was making progress toward a miniature nuclear weapon that it could one day hand off to the terror group. Armey then supported the resolution and Cheney, of course, turned out to be wildly wrong. “I deserved better than to be bullshitted by the vice president,” Armey told Cheney biographer Barton Gellman.

And Cheney continues to this day to maintain that torturing al-Qaeda suspects was the right thing to do.

This is the person the Republican Party is still listening to on foreign policy. And considering that much of its rebranding efforts are turning out to be miserable failures, it’s not surprise then that the GOP — much like Mitt Romney during last year’s presidential campaign — just can’t quit Dick Cheney and the neocons.

As for North Korea, is the U.S. really in “deep doo doo”? Korea expert Andrei Lankov wrote in today’s New York Times that “it does not make sense to credulously take their fake belligerence at face value and give them the attention they want now. It would be better if people in Washington and New York took a lesson from the people of Seoul” and ignore it.

It was only a matter of time before the right wing would turn the current crisis on the Korean peninsula into a parody. It’s not entirely surprising that chief conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney kicked things off on Thursday with an interesting theory about he thinks the real threat from North Korea is.

Gaffney told Laura Ingraham radio show fill-in host Raymond Arroyo that we should really be worried about the North Koreans putting one of their nukes on a ship to the West Coast, attaching it on a short-range missile and — don’t aim it at any particular large American city where it would inflict the most damage — but fire it up above the atmosphere creating the dreaded “Electro Magnetic Pulse” that will (supposedly) put the entire United States out of business for good:

GAFFNEY: They certainly have an abundance of shorter range missiles which could be brought close to our shores aboard ships. A capability that their Iranian partners, we know, have demonstrated. And by lobbing a relatively small, relatively unsophisticated nuclear weapon of the kind that they seem to have tested now three times on one of these short range missiles high over the United States and detonating it outside of our atmosphere, the North Koreans know they could inflict incalculable harm on this country, even perhaps with just one of these weapons.

And how would that work? Such a weapon detonated in space would trigger something called “Electro Magnetic Pulse,” a very powerful form of electromagnetic energy that would essentially damage or destroy every piece of electronic gear and particularly sensitive equipment like transformers that are the backbone of our electrical power grid. And if those go down, we cease to exist as a 21st Century society because without electrical power, look at Katrina as an example or what happened with Sandy more recently, except the power doesn’t come back on after a couple of days or a couple of weeks. It stays off and that means, really, returning us to kind of a pre-industrial society.

Listen to the clip here:

So the North Koreas will ship a nuke and a missile all the way to the United States — undetected — attach the nuke to the missile (a process they have yet to master) and launch it way up in the atmosphere while U.S. defense officials (particularly the Missile Defense Agency) are none the wiser. If that sounds like something out of a doomsday fiction novel (or a video game), you’re right.

As CAP’s Matt Duss once noted referring to Gaffney’s claim that Iran would pull off such a stunt, “it’s probably worth pointing out here that the likelihood of Iran, or anyone, actually pulling off such an attack is roughly the same as Iran building an enormous, space-bound vacuum cleaner and sucking up all of America’s oxygen.”

Gaffney — who is is director of the far-right Center for Security Policy and whose writing regularly appears in somewhat mainstream publications — is also one of the country’s most prominent Islamophobes and was the brainchild behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) conspiracy theory she famously peddled last year that certain elements of the U.S. government were under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood (Bachmann got to keep her seat on the House Intelligence Committee after the widely-panned and criticized affair).

But what is the real threat from North Korea? ThinkProgress has a run-down here.

North Korea’s government on Friday firmly suggested that the diplomats present at embassies in Pyongyang consider taking their leave, in yet another escalation of their war of words. Across the border in South Korea, the question of whether or not their own nuclear arsenal is required to meet Northern aggression has taken on a new impetus in the last weeks.

Secretary of State John Kerry on Thursday announced a new overseas trip that would take him the Korean peninsula, primarily to deal with the heightened tensions in East Asia. South Korea’s semi-official Yonhap news agency is also reporting that formal talks to revise a U.S.-Republic of Korea bilateral nuclear accord would take place soon after Kerry’s visit.

South Korea is one of twenty-four other countries engaged with the U.S. in what are known as 123 Agreements — so-called because they are established under Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The U.S. is also in the process of negotiating 123 Agreements with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam.

Under the terms of the 123 Agreement — which was last renegotiated in 1974 — South Korea currently operates 23 civilian nuclear reactors at four sites across the country. But under the 1974 agreement, South Korea was barred from reprocessing its spent nuclear fuel, due to fears of it being diverted towards a nuclear weapons program. That provision is what’s currently spurring South Korea’s push to open new talks over the agreement.

The argument over reprocessing, however, is being looked at under a new light, given the turning tide among South Koreans over whether their country requires nuclear weapons to serve as a deterrent against the North — which at present possesses enough nuclear fuel for at least 10 plutonium-based nuclear bombs. Two recent opinion polls taken in South Korea showed two-thirds of those surveyed supported the idea of developing nuclear weapons to defend against a North Korean attack. Conservative politicians in South Korea are beginning to latch onto this idea as well:

“We, the Korean people, have been duped by North Korea for the last 20 to 30 years and it is now time for South Koreans to face the reality and do something that we need to do,” said Chung Mong-joon, a lawmaker in the governing Saenuri (New Frontier) Party and a former presidential conservative candidate. “The nuclear deterrence can be the only answer. We have to have nuclear capability.”

At present, the Republic of Korea falls under what’s known as the U.S.’ “nuclear umbrella,” a pledge to use its own nuclear weapons in the protection of South Korea in exchange for them not developing their own. That pledge was likely the deciding factor in the launch of B-2 stealth bombers over South Korea last week, a show of force meant to both reassure South Korea and warn Pyongyang. South Korea’s determination to allow for reprocessing, however, have some concerned that Seoul is no longer completely certain of the U.S. ability to keep them safe. At the same time, a new poll out by Gallup found that 55 percent of Americans said the U.S. should defend South Korea if the North attacks.

However, experts say that not only is it a bad idea for the South Koreans to push for nuclear weapons, but they’re also unlikely to go in that direction. It “would deeply undermine the security situation on the peninsula and the leadership in Seoul understands this,” Arms Control Association Executive Director Daryl Kimball told ThinkProgress. “Talk about South Korean nuclear weapons only makes the situation worse and would further goad the North.”

“Developing a nuclear weapon would be disastrous to the world’s 13th largest economy that is heavily dependent of international trade,” said James Lewis, spokesman for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in a statement released this week. “There would be no smartphones, fashion or superstars like Psy. South Korea can either have Psy or a nuke — they will likely pick Psy.”

As tensions continue to rise on the Korean peninsula, internet hactivist collective Anonymous has joined the fray — and appears to have been very successful at penetrating North Korea’s superficial cybersecurity defenses. ReadWrite reports:

“On Tuesday, the group claimed to have stolen 15,000 passwords from the communist nation as part of what it calls Operation North Korea. Late Wednesday, as tensions rose in Kaesong over the North’s closure and seizure of a industrial park it shares with the South, along with repeated declarations of nuclear launch, Anonymous advanced its own chess pieces. The hackers allegedly seized control of North Korea’s official Twitter and Flickr accounts, in the process defacing several related websites, and making the autocratic nation look extremely unprepared for cyber attack.”

The primary North Korean propaganda site Uriminzokkiri.com also appears to be down, possibly as the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack — all with demands that Kim Jong Un step down in favor of a direct democracy regime, cease “making nukes and nuke-threats,” and allow citizens access to the open internet. All very admirable goals, although it’s highly unlikely North Korean citizens are aware of their regime’s internet embarrassment because of that very lack of internet access: Although the country did briefly open up mobile data access for tourists earlier this year, a policy it reversed very quickly, most North Koreans only have access to the nation’s intranet, Kwangmyong, if anything at all.

Security analysts are skeptical of claims that the group has infiltrated the Kwangmyong, and as others have noted, managing to gain control of social media accounts and taking down the propaganda website are more likely to result in punishments for the lower level North Korean operatives in charge of maintaining those resources than cause the regime to topple.

While Anonymous’s actions certainly demonstrate that North Korea’s cyber defense strategies on superficial sites leave something to be desired, there is also a risk that it could tip the balance of a very delicate diplomatic situation. As ThinkProgress has noted previously, the current situation may be more serious than the saber rattling status quo of Korean peninsular relations recent years: North Korea recently announced an end to the 1953 Armistice Agreement and pledged to attack the U.S. and its allies in the region. While the exact nature of the military threat North Korea poses is debatable, one of the few things that is certain is that the sheer unpredictability of the nation represents a very real threat to global security.

As amusing as Anonymous’s attacks on the country may be, hitting North Korea with the digital equivalent of pocket sand might only serve to anger the regime, possibly even making them blink in a way that is bad for everyone involved.

CNN reported Thursday morning that intercepted communications indicate that North Korea may be planning to launch ballistic missiles “within days,” in yet another potential escalation. South Korean Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin also told a government panel on Thursday that North Korea has moved a medium-range missile to its eastern coast, possibly in preparation for either a test or military demonstration.

North Korea’s threat comes from three factors: the unpredictability of its leader, Kim Jong Un; its ongoing nuclear weapons program; and its large amount of conventional weapons. Despite the difficulty it has seen in testing and its lack of large stockpiles of fissile material, North Korea’s nuclear program remains a major concern. North Korea appears to have jump-started the process of getting its plutonium reactor at Yongbon back online, but it will possibly take years to produce enough material for new weapons. At present, North Korea is estimated to have enough plutonium for 10 nuclear warheads, but Pyongyang’s ability to shrink down a nuclear warhead to the size where it would fit on a missile has advanced significantly and the country theoretically maintains rudimentary delivery methods within the region. There is also concern that North Korea could sell its weapons and/or weapons technology to third parties.

Even in light of Pyongyang’s nuclear capacity, North Korea’s large array of missiles and rockets remain a considerable threat to the peace and stability of the region. Of those conventional weapons, North Korea’s short-range Scud and Rodong missiles pose the greatest risk to U.S. assets in the area, given their high number and accuracy. With an estimated 1,800-mile range, the Musudan medium-range missile — which is mostly likely the type moved to the North Korean cost on Thursday — also may pose a significant threat, but its effectiveness has been questioned given the missile’s lack of prominent testing.

North Korea’s longer range missiles — the Taepodong-2 and Uhna rocket — are less reliable, both in accuracy and in performance. In 2006, a test of the Taepodong-2 completely failed, as did its use in an attempt to place a satellite in orbit in 2009. In Dec. 2012, North Korea did successfully test the Unha rocket, claiming to use it to a satellite in orbit. Estimates of the range for the Unha places it at approximately 4,500 miles — able to reach the U.S. West Coast — although experts have said that it is highly unlikely that North Korean missiles can hit the U.S. mainland and the Unha’s accuracy is completely unknown.

In any case, it is more likely that the launch of North Korean missiles would be a threat to U.S. allies and assets in the region, including South Korea and Japan. South Korea is well-within range of the shortest range missiles, with Seoul being only 35 miles from the Demilitarized Zone. That short distance also lends itself to the possibility that North Korea could drop a nuclear bomb on the country, rather than launch a nuclear warhead. Japan, while not particularly caught in this current spiral, has also been on the receiving end of North Korea’s threats. The two countries are home to a combined 64,000 U.S. forces, stationed in bases at Okinawa, the DMZ, and other locations.
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North Korea has ratcheted up tensions on the Korean peninsula another notch, this time barring South Korean workers from accessing an industrial complex shared between the two countries.

Beginning on Wednesday, North Korea announced, the Kaesong industrial complex would no longer be allowing in workers from the South, nor shipments of goods, effectively shutting down the one remaining open entry point between the two countries. Seoul has indicated that its 850 citizens working at the complex’s factories at the time of the announcement will be allowed return, but few have done so yet:

The BBC’s Lucy Williamson, at the border, says many have decided not to return immediately because they fear they will not be allowed back in.

One South Korean worker who returned from the complex said some of his colleagues had been held up because they had no transport.

“Other people couldn’t return because they were supposed to be taken home on trucks scheduled to carry supplies into North Korea, but the trucks couldn’t get into the North,” said the worker.

South Korea has demanded that the access point be reopened immediately, and warned of retaliation in the event that South Koreans are harmed. More than 100 South Korean industries have production facilities at the Kaesong complex, which combined pay over $90 million in North Korean salaries every year.

Opened in 2004 as a gesture of goodwill between the states, the Kaesong complex is one of the few legal methods remaining for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — as the reclusive communist regime is formally known — to acquire hard currency. This isn’t the first time the complex has been closed; it was briefly shutdown in 2009, as a protest over joint United States-South Korea military exercise, but there’s no indication as to how long this closure may last. Meanwhile, the Demilitarized Zone — the 2.5 mile wide stretch of land between the two countries — is still being patrolled so far, ruling out any immediate threat of renewed fighting between the two countries.

The move from North Korea is the latest in a long string of moves that has observers of the situation on edge. While no new military movements have been detected on the part of North Korea, its rhetoric has made predicting the North’s next action difficult. On Tuesday, North Korea announced that it intended to restart its shuttered nuclear facilities, which are capable of producing plutonium and enriched uranium.

General U.S. James Thurman — commander of the U.S. forces in Korea and head of the United Nations Command there — spoke with ABC News about the continuing escalations on Tuesday in a rare interview. Asked whether he felt that North Korea’s rhetoric was just empty threats, Gen. Thurman replied, “No, I don’t think that they are. We’ve got to take every threat seriously.” In response to provocations from the North, the U.S. has positioned two warships capable of downing ballistic missiles off the Korean coast.

(Photo: Trucks re-enter South Korea from the North. Credit: European Pressphoto Agency)