johnhemming2 wrote: However, a nuclear response is to be avoided.
Yes if at all possible. But that does not include surrendering to demands from NK based on a one or two missile capability.
Someone from our military needs to communicate to some sane general in the upper echelons of the NK military the capabilities of our nuclear armed submarines including the abilities of merved SLIBMs and just how many missiles we keep armed and in range of the Korean peninsula at all times.
The realities should make any such war out of the question but the "Supreme Leader" of North Korea does not seem to have a firm grasp on reality and that is what has everybody in range of his missiles nervous.
vtsnowedin wrote: The realities should make any such war out of the question but the "Supreme Leader" of North Korea does not seem to have a firm grasp on reality and that is what has everybody in range of his missiles nervous.
That is the difficulty. It is the unpredictability of NK that would worry me if I lived close by.
An all out nuclear strike on NK would have implications for SK in particular as well as the rest of the world. What should be emphasised to NK is the consequences of an all out conventional strike possibly in conjunction with a few nuclear missiles on strategic targets, i.e. the Great Leader himself.
vtsnowedin wrote: The realities should make any such war out of the question but the "Supreme Leader" of North Korea does not seem to have a firm grasp on reality and that is what has everybody in range of his missiles nervous.
That is the difficulty. It is the unpredictability of NK that would worry me if I lived close by.
The leader of the US doesn't really have a firm grasp on reality either. His unpredictability and his penchant for changing his mind based on the thoughts of the last person who spoke to him worries me! He's likely to order a nuclear strike just to divert attention from his next F--k-up.
vtsnowedin wrote: The realities should make any such war out of the question but the "Supreme Leader" of North Korea does not seem to have a firm grasp on reality and that is what has everybody in range of his missiles nervous.
That is the difficulty. It is the unpredictability of NK that would worry me if I lived close by.
The leader of the US doesn't really have a firm grasp on reality either. His unpredictability and his penchant for changing his mind based on the thoughts of the last person who spoke to him worries me! He's likely to order a nuclear strike just to divert attention from his next ****-up.
I agree - they're both cut from the same cloth....
It's just that one of them is better 'tooled up' than the other.....
Trump might even be envious of the personality cult that Kim has been able to maintain....
These constant assignments of infantile, narcissistic personality traits to Trump are pretty infantile themselves, to be honest. Don't misunderstand me - he is an egotistical arsehole. But, then most people who aspire to power and who hold it are egotistical arseholes.
Trump just strikes me as the kind of man I have met a few times in my life. Hard nosed, non-intellectual, but bright. Brash to the point of being boorish. In other words an archetype of a particular kind of businessman.
I'm not sure whether he's stupid or whether he's got a mental defect that allows him to drive himself, and take us with him, over a cliff in an effort to make himself more money or achieve more personal aggrandisement.
I am firmly of the opinion that we are being run by a bunch of people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, in the form of collecting ever increasing amounts of money and power, and should be locked up in an asylum rather than walk the corridors of power.
I've heard/read a couple of sources that he's unable to sustain concentration for long; he soon gets bored or just switches off.
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
I experience pleasure and pains, and pursue goals in service of them, so I cannot reasonably deny the right of other sentient agents to do the same - Steven Pinker
What short memories people have. We do remember, do we not, that the US bombed North Korea back to the stone ages in the 1950s, with an estimated death toll in the many hundreds of thousands if not the millions...right?
I expect that the shares in whoever makes the Patriot missile have gone up quite a bit.
I thought it was North Korea that started the Korean war. "Sowing the wind and reaping" and all that!
If the US and South Korea had designs on the North they have had plenty of opportunities and the strength over the last 50 years to have fought their way in. Recently it has got more difficult as China's strength has increased. The fact that the North is still paranoid speaks for the instability of the people running the regime just as the utterings of Trump speak of his instability.
You are able to look at the geopolitical and military history of the USA over the last 50 years and still consider a strong fear of America by anyone who is not fully aligned and or subservient to their interests as irrational?
