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South korean warship sunks after possible torpedo attack.

South Korean naval ship sunk

A South Korean navy patrol ship was sinking near the disputed western sea border with North Korea on Friday after suffering damage to its hull, the South Korean military said.

The South Korean authorities were investigating the possibility that the 1,200-ton ship had been attacked by a torpedo fired by the North Korean navy, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported, citing an unnamed military source. The agency reported that another South Korean patrol ship had fired at an unidentified vessel shortly after the first ship was damaged.

Those reports could not be independently confirmed.

“Many of the 104 sailors on the ship jumped into the sea, and there is a fear that there may be some human causalities,” Yonhap reported.

President Lee Myung-bak ordered an emergency meeting of security-related cabinet ministers at an underground bunker at his office, the Blue House in Seoul, South Korean news reports said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/27/world/asia/27korea.html?ref=world

Not good, not good.
 
Latest song on the South Korean hit parade...
 

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i really hope this was not a deliberate North Korean attack. 50 dead South Korean sailors would not be appreciated by the South Koreans or the USA. major wars have started over much less.

though, this kinda thing could be all over before we ever hear about it.
 
dudalb said:
Great Leader might really be pushing it.
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I thought all Great Leader was pushing was daisies, as in up. Isn't the current one "Dear Leader"? Maybe the next one will be "Imperious Leader", with a single red eye that oscillates like an electric fan...
 
sts60 said:
I thought all Great Leader was pushing was daisies, as in up. Isn't the current one "Dear Leader"? Maybe the next one will be "Imperious Leader", with a single red eye that oscillates like an electric fan...
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No, I believe the son will be the magical fantastic super leader.
 
Don't these kinds of naval skirmishes happen all the time around the disputed region? Maybe it will escalate, or maybe it's just par for the course.
 
Captain.Sassy said:
Don't these kinds of naval skirmishes happen all the time around the disputed region? Maybe it will escalate, or maybe it's just par for the course.
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Not on the order of a warship being sunk. Warning shots across the bow, merchant or fishing trawlers held for a time.

The way most warships have been designed (and this class is fairly recent, 1984 utilizing the LM-2500 gas turbine engine also used on US DDG's) in recent years limits the possibility of sudden catastrophic explosion from mechanical failure or ordnance cook-off. We've simply learned too many hard lessons from the sea, and these have been incorporated by ship designers the world over.

This ship is about 1500T displacement. A sudden and massive explosion that they didn't see coming almost certainly points to a mine or a torpedo. The ASUW variant of this craft has no hull-mounted sonar, and NK's diesel boats are more than capable of getting a Type 53 on target.

This is bad.
 
Bah, ships have always been sinking, why is it all of a sudden a bad thing...
...oh, wait, this isn't an AGW thread. Let me get my logic hat.

There. Much better.

I was going to post a thread on this myself, but this thread beat me to it, it seems. Agree, not good at all, and here's hoping it was a freak accident and not the madmen from the north.
 
I seriously doubt an accident. LM-2500's don't just explode. A fuel line might rupture and cause a mainspace fire, but this won't be explosive in nature. It can most certainly sink the ship, but it's not particularly explosive in and of itself. There's just not that many things on a ship anymore that spontaneously go boom on their own - anymore even the artillery rounds are electronically fuzed.
 
NK actually starting an following through on a shooting war seems crazy to me, even for them. Use they may have nukes, but the use of a nuke would end the country in massive retaliation, and the object of the regime is survival...more so, imo, than reunification. Second, the military hardware incorporated into the South's forces is significantly superior to that of the north. Yes, the north may have more troops at the ready, but their weaponry is, for the most part old, untested and in many ways obsolete.
Third, if the North were to push into the South, their troops would nearly instantly discover the lies they've been told about the south and its living standard...something the Kim regime really doesn't want to know. China and Russia now have significant commercial ties to the South, they're not going to be interested in the North fighting a war...all of which says to me that the North is going to have to, in some billigerant way, back down.
 
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