Korean Barbecue Redux

According to Time magazine's analysis of the UN's exhaustive report from international experts on the sinking of the frigate Cheonan in March, it pretty much absolutely had to be the North Koreans who did it.

The document, a draft of which has been seen by TIME, consists of 286 pages of sometimes dense scientific and engineering analysis. It not only presents the case for why a North Korean attack is the "only plausible possibility" but sources with detailed knowledge of its preparation say that its intent is to pick apart, in a manner worthy of a Sherlock Holmes story, the most prominent competing theories that have been publicly raised in the months sine the incident. There is no way the ship ran aground, the report says, because the damage to the Cheonan's hull was in no way consistent with that scenario. To the contrary, "two types of hull deformations, impossible to occur in a grounding event, were observed."

The possibility of a friendly fire episode, widely debated on the web in South Korea and elsewhere, is similarly dismissed. The report asserts that all "submarines from neighboring countries were either in or near their home bases at the time of the incident." A collision with another boat? No trace of "an incoming vessel" was found. A ship-to-ship or ground-to-ship missile? The damage done to the Cheonan, the report states, would have been considerably different had that happened. In all, the report runs through 10 different possible scenarios of why the ship might have sunk, and after outlining the evidence in each of those cases it concludes with the words: "no chance."

By contrast, it labels the notion that a North Korean torpedo struck and sunk the Cheonan as a "high possibility." It asserts that the survivors of the Cheonan heard "one or two explosion sounds [sic]," and says that South Korean Marine sentries posted on the nearby Baekyrong Island testified to seeing "a flash of white light" about 100 meters in height. The report further states that analysis done by the U.S. Navy for the joint commission concludes that the sub fired a torpedo with an explosive weight of 250 kilograms that blew up just under the center of the boat, to its port side, at a depth of six to nine meters. The report goes on to a detailed technical discussion of "shape and trace analysis," which explains why the damage done to the Cheonan's hull is consistent with a torpedo attack.

In other words this is a hell of a Friday night news dump because it basically accuses North Korea of a major act of war.  Not sure where this goes from here, but it probably won't be good and it could be absolutely disastrous.