N. Korea has nuclear ICBMs. Threatened to launch US premptive strike for UN sanctions

1) Absolutely absurd. In the same set of circumstances, your defense people are just as likely to use it as anyone's defense people. The US will not use it until they need to use it. China has not used them. Russia has not used them. Israel has not used them. No one has used them, except the US. All of them have threatened to use them at various junctures. There is nothing exceptional about not using nukes, everyone is aware of the consequences, from dictatorial warlords to democratically elected presidents. No one on planet earth is thinking "I can't wait to get a nuke so I can push the button ASAP."

Everyone wants to get it because of the political power associated with the unspoken threat of having them. The mullahs and the N Korean dynasty will not use them except as a last resort - i.e. not unless they are certainly going to be removed from power forcefully by their enemies. A good example of this is... oh wait, there's only one example of using such weapons. Ever.

2) * Cuban missile crisis. IIRC Kennedy referred to the chance of nuclear war breaking out as 50-50?

3) Precisely. So why are you dancing around the issue as if there's this moral superiority in your government? Power is power. All governments want to protect themselves since they see themselves as appropriate representatives of the people. Your power, thankfully, happens to have more checks and balances involved. But as we've seen, not nearly enough for non-Americans to feel safe or for your power people to run around the world stealing people's tangible and intangible stuff from them - at times, without your permission.

It may not be a huge problem for you that your gov has pissed on your constitution at a few important junctures in recent history. To everyone else, that's where our lives flash before our eyes. Because the more those guys escape your control - and they are trying hard - is when the entire world is in real danger of annihilation. Almost no one else has that potential for damage.

 

Guys, honestly, there's just too many of you so I'm going to try to not reply anymore.

 

I don't recall the US or any Western countries threatening to use offensively nukes the way that both Iran and North Korea have. You can keep pretending everyone in the world is equally moral, but it doesn't make it true.

That's a very different statement than the US threatening to launch a bunch of nukes.

The bolded part ruins your whole argument that all countries are equally likely to use nukes and no government is more trustworthy than any other.

 

I wonder how much that changes with a nuke in play. Be chummy while secretly building your own?

I'd think the status quo would be different, eh?

I don't know how they'd do it 'exactly the same way' of governance when the US didn't have any open and indiscriminate purges of their former leadership.

The Russo-Japanese War kindled a lot of bad blood between the two powers, and what Russia did to Germany was pretty barbaric. You can use east Germany as reference of their governance.

Even their intention would be different. I could go as far as agreeing that both would use Japan as a proxy state, but beyond that is black and white. Russia would never build up Japan or Germany like the United States if only because they were unable to sustain their own rapid economic growth post 60s and therefore lacked the leadership or guidance to do so.

Was the Cold War a distant memory for you? Or it is a subject stripped devoid of context to you and cast as a parable of worse and worst superpowers?

If you want to play like that, what the United States does isn't really your business even if what we do affects your business.

In the case of Germans and Japanese, what the US had not done would've marked a completely different position than what they enjoy now.

 

Tired of responding to this 1940's type propaganda about the nobility of the US government.

All I will say is, every thing the US does is directly my business. Not because I want it to be, but because your peeps keep voting for people who force it to be that way. Till that changes, everything you do is my business too. Got it? Thanks.

 

I'm not sure what counterfactual theories you've read. Even if it were a choice of bad to worse the USSR was definitely the worse choice.

 

Where you aware that in Saipan and Okinawa that Japanese civilians either voluntarily or were forced to kill themselves by Japanese soldiers rather than surrender to US forces? Every major battle with the Japanese showed that they were prepared to not only die themselves in battle but sacrifice their families doing so. This isn't US propaganda but Japanese rhetoric themselves. All historic evidence points to likely far far greater casualties if a ground invasion. You are arguing with no facts to back up your view that somehow dropping the bombs would've resulted in less casualties to civilians.

Your last paragraph basically proves that you have no grasp or context of history pacifist or not. If you see no difference between an empire whose soldiers where encouraged to rape and murder civilians and forced captured women to be comfort women with the post war US you don't know history.

Your last post in this thread though pretty much explains why. You clearly are unable to consider any issue regarding the US objectively because you feel you and your people have been victimized by the US.

 

At the time of Pearl Harbor the US had little interest in the rest of the World and most of the US was isolationist. Consider that by the time of Pearl Harbor US Allies in Europe had already been at war officially for 2 years. Roosevelt did everything he could to get the US involved but most of the US had little interest in getting involved until Pearl Harbor.

 

Personally i feel that China is probably the last country that wants NKorea to be making threats or starting wars. USA has nothing to worry about as non of Nkorea's missles are able to reach American soil, China on the other hand is different, their firing range can reach Shanghai with ease. China right now is put in a very difficult position; NK is in a very poor state and aid + support is never ending with no return, while on the other hand, if China sides with USA, basically threats towards China from NK is not empty at all.

 

Saw this on Yahoo news this morning. Thought it should be put here

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/north-korea-video-propaganda-us-troops-rockets-125355219.html

<a href="<iframe width=" 640"="" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9VQ7NjGeIRw?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9VQ7NjGeIRw?feature=player_detailpage" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="360" width="640"></iframe>

 

Things aren't looking good on the Korean Peninsula. What seems bad to me about this is that even if NK is just sabre rattling cutting off the lines of communications means that a misunderstanding or accident could lead to war.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/w...uts-last-remaining-hotline-to-south.html?_r=0

North Korea Cuts Off the Remaining Military Hot Lines With South Korea

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea cut off the last remaining military hot lines with South Korea on Wednesday, accusing President Park Geun-hye of South Korea of pursuing the same hard-line policy of her predecessor that the North blamed for a prolonged chill in inter-Korean relations.

Amid tensions over the North’s third nuclear test last month and ensuing United Nations sanctions, North Korea had already shut down Red Cross hot lines with South Korea and a communication line with the American military command in South Korea. But the North’s decision to cut off military hot lines with South Korea on Wednesday was taken more seriously in Seoul because the two Koreas have used those four telephone lines to control daily cross-border traffic of workers and cargo traveling to the North Korean border town of Kaesong.

The two countries run a joint industrial park at Kaesong, the last symbol of inter-Korean cooperation that has survived the political tensions of recent years. Seoul officials said 887 South Korean workers were in Kaesong on Wednesday. The traffic was running normally on Wednesday and Thursday morning, with long lines of trucks crawling through the border crossing, South Korean officials said, indicating that the North Korean military did not go so far as to stop cross-border economic exchanges.

“There do not exist any dialogue channel and communications means between the D.P.R.K. and the U.S. and between the North and the South,” said a North Korean statement sent to the South Korean military by telephone and later carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. “Not words but only arms will work on the U.S. and the South Korean puppet forces.”

D.P.R.K. stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name.

The North’s action came a day after its top military command ordered all of its missile and artillery units to be on “the highest alert” and ready to strike the United States and South Korea. It also vowed to take “substantial military actions” to retaliate against joint United States-South Korean military drills, which involved American B-52 bomber sorties over South Korea.

The last time North Korea severed all military hot lines, during joint United States-South Korean military drills in 2009, it allowed an inter-Korean economic liaison office in Kaesong to serve as a communication channel with Seoul, and South Korean workers could commute to Kaesong. The two Koreas continue to maintain hot lines between their civil aviation authorities.

“Under the situation where a war may break out any moment, there is no need to keep North-South military communications,” the North said on Wednesday.

The North Korean action came shortly after the South’s president, Ms. Park, stressed both firmness and reciprocity in her nation’s policy toward the North.

“If North Korea provokes or does things that harm peace, we must make sure that it gets nothing but will pay the price, while if it keeps its promises, the South should do the same,” Ms. Park said during a briefing with her government’s top diplomats and North Korea policy makers. “Without rushing, and in the same way we would lay one brick after another, we must develop South-North relations step by step, based on trust, and create sustainable peace.”

Her new unification minister, Ryoo Kihl-jae, South Korea’s point man on North Korea, later told reporters that his government was willing to consider lifting trade embargoes imposed on the North after the deadly sinking of a South Korean Navy ship in 2010, but not before North Korea takes responsibility for the sinking, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

Seoul blamed a North Korean torpedo attack, but the government in Pyongyang insists that it had nothing to do with it.

“We keep our door open for dialogue,” Mr. Ryoo said.

But on Wednesday, the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, the North Korean counterpart to Mr. Ryoo’s ministry, berated Ms. Park for warning a day earlier that the Pyongyang government could ensure its survival only when it stops building nuclear weapons while its people go hungry.

“This time her remarks have gone beyond the line,” the committee said.

It said Ms. Park’s recent comments were “utterly shocking” compared with her earlier indications that she would not maintain the hard-line policy of her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak, whom she replaced on Feb. 25.

“If she keeps to the road of confrontation like traitor Lee, defying the warnings of the D.P.R.K., she will meet a miserable ruin,” the committee said.

Also Wednesday, the North’s main ruling-party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said it planned “substantial military actions,” including “pre-emptive nuclear strikes” against the United States and South Korea.

Despite its successful launching of a three-stage rocket in December, however, “North Korea doesn’t have the capability to carry out this latest threat to attack U.S. bases” in Hawaii, the United States mainland and Guam using long-range missiles, said James Hardy, the Asia Pacific editor for IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly.

The Pentagon recently announced that it would ramp up its missile defense on the West Coast and Alaska, citing the threat of North Korea’s KN-08 missiles, which were unveiled during a military parade in Pyongyang last April.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 27, 2013

The headline with an earlier version of this article overstated the extent of North Korea’s actions. North and South Korea continue to maintain hot lines between their civil aviation authorities; the North did not shut down the last hot line between the two.

North Korea Cuts Off the Remaining Military Hot Lines With South Korea

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/30/us-korea-north-war-idUSBRE92T00020130330

 

Obama might be tempted to hit them first. The rhetoric is dangerous. It's difficult to sit there and be threatened like that and not take it extremely seriously.

 

Apparently Kim Jong Handsome doesn't understand the meaning of self preservation. What the hell does he think is going to happen to his country if he attacks S. Korea?

 

That boy is going to get a lot of people killed.

 

If you read Nothing to Envy, which I recommend all the time for a study of DPRK, you see a populace that is starving while wavering back and forth between patriotic delusion and knowing something is deeply, deeply wrong.

If he's losing control of some faction of the inner circle, he may be trying to circle the wagons with the rhetoric. Or he could be getting ready to essentially die in flames, as some kind of warped hero.

Basically, he has no bargaining angle through any kind of normal talks, so he probably sees the current escalation as the only way to create leverage.

EDIT: larsv8 put all this more succinctly. Sad but probably very, very true. I don't see a good end to DPRK. I don't see how it can be smooth or even peaceful.

 

If only China would climb aboard and abandon NK. It looks like they are close to doing so anyway. Stronger relations with Russia, China publicly showing disapproval of NK's actions, etc.

 

Hardly.

The US doesn't want war with North Korea, and the proof more or less is in the public perception that we have of them. The North Korean military is no more or less dangerous than the Iranian military, and in fact might be more problematic because of the country's mountainous terrain.

Yet what's the perception? North Korea's a joke, a nuisance but a punchline at best, whether it's mentioning Best Korea, Dennis Rodman, or whatever. The US does its best to play down North Korean aggression, even when it attacks South Korean ships and such. Compare that with Iran. What do you think the American response would be if Iran shot down an Iraqi plane tomorrow? Or if they started kidnapping other Shi'ites? I'm not saying the US wants war with Iran necessarily, just that they would prefer an engagement there compared to North Korea.

You know how ATW said earlier that the Japanese would have a problem with Korean reunification? It's really the Chinese who would, especially Korea has been used as a jumping point for a invasion of China like we did eighty years ago. China may be annoyed with North Korea and has stated that they won't help NK if they attack South Korea, but they will not tolerate an SK or USA attack.

 

Austin, Texas feel my wrath...

 

I think this very well is the case that he is trying to cement his power. The problem though is that in this type of environment a misstep or misunderstanding by NK, SK or the US could lead to a war that none of them actually want.