Am I the only one that finds the timing of all this odd? The US changes Presidents and within 6 months, NK missile technology advances a decade? Seemingly by magic?
And note that all these recent revelations are not coming from the CIA, but rather the DoD’s much smaller intel shop.
That’s Nice
So we have a (possibly) ICBM-nuclear ready North Korea, Russia at our door and a deranged Trump in command of the US arsenal.
What could go wrong?
Hmm I thought we didn’t have very good intelligence inside NK. But could be real.
Also odd how fast they are making breakthroughs recently. Could they be getting help? I have nothing to support this claim other than the rapid series of achievements recently.
I smell a rat.
Boogyman Tail waggin’ misdirection.
Never mind any Russian investigation
Never mind any Trump Finances investigation
This is war dontcha know they’re going to annihilate Hawaii,Alaska, the West coast.
Except even if they made one small enough , they haven’t figured out how to survive reentry
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-11/south-korea-doubts-north-korea-has-icbm-re-entry-technology
Hilarity will ensue…
Or radiation poisoning…
“NBC News confirmed the report, citing an unnamed U.S. official.”
Uh huh…
And Judith Miller saw aluminum tubes in Pyongyang.
And Kim Jong-il financed 9/11.
And “Camelpox”.
Operation Korean Freedom is on the march!
Sweet baby Jesus, don’t let Graham and McCain go on Fox & Friends. The Republic might not survive it.
The ultimate Trump-Russia distraction, a Trumped up nuclear war with North Korea. Talk about shiny objects!
We’ll meet again
Don’t know where
Don’t know when
But I know we’ll meet again some sunny day…
Can we stop this? There is NO scenario in which NK uses a nuclear weapon that Kim Jung Un survives. He’s dead if he presses that button and he knows it. If you look at that twerp’s antics you’ll see he’s a lot like Trump. All about himself. We empower him with articles about NK posing areal threat. That’s why he does it.
Most reports suggest that Kim is not suicidal. So, the obvious course would be to let him know that (a) the US and its allies will not attempt to overthrow his regime and (b) if he fires a missile his country will disappear from the face of the Earth. Anything else–like saying that the DPRK has to agree to give up its nuclear capability before we’ll talk–is foolish, fatuous or downright dangerous.
That approach requires patience. Who’s the president again?
Time for me to climb up on the roof with a bucket of red paint so I can paint a target with the Korean for “right the fuck here”? I don’t do aftermath…
Don’t panic, the strategic genius that is Trump is at the helm.
What could go wrong?
Wasn’t by magic. The people who pay attention to this for a living will tell you that the North Koreans have been making slow, methodical progress on this, and on the missiles, for close to two decades now.
Heard a story–which, I think maybe was on This American Life for some reason–about an arms control expert with a closely followed podcast. He laid out how the process has proceeded, the milestones along the way and how most of them were derided as pathetic failures when, in fact, in both nuclear weapons and rocketry, failure is as instructive, or more instructive, than success. He said that the derision is easy because of how crazy and bombastic they are, but that we were mostly doing it to blind ourselves to the reality that we ran out of options to stop this years and years ago and have been fooling ourselves about it ever since. And that self-deception isn’t just among the public, but among diplomats and policy makers.
He also said all the talk in the media about them soon having a missile that could reach LA is weird because,based on the altitude and thrust of that first ICBM test, they can already hit New York.
Our last and only chance to stop this ended when Bush and the neocon morons stamped out the Clinton deal with the North Koreans. Yeah, they were cheating by running a secret uranium program while they laid off plutonium, but we also weren’t delivering on our promises. Regardless, that was the last time they were willing to deal–it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t morally clean and it wasn’t easy, but it’s the closest thing to success we had or will ever have. We’ve been lying to ourselves ever since.
Could be bluster (remember Saddam’s WMD’s, Colin Powell’s UN presentation, the rank fear mongering?), or it could be real (is the intel legitimate this time? where is it coming from, really?). In either case, with DT in the WH, it is not reassuring. Distrust reigns!
Oh shit.
Yeah, the scary part is that we now down to the exact same single option we had after the USSR and then China developed them–deterrence. In this case, we will also have some viable interception options for a while to add to their strategic uncertainty because it’s going to be difficult for them to build up the kind of arsenal that ensures some will get through with their economy, and harder still to find a place to put them where they will be safe from a preemptive strike.
But we’re basically just down to deterrence, the certainty that their country will be reduced to a radioactive glass and sterile cinders if they even look like launching. And deterrence is not a thing that an infantile bombastic, surrogate dick-waving buffoon like Trump can even conceive of as effective policy.
we were mostly doing it to blind ourselves to the reality that we ran out of options to stop this years and years ago and have been fooling ourselves about it ever since. And that self-deception isn’t just among the public, but among diplomats and policy makers.
Any notion that 1950s technology can be kept forever out of reach of a poor-but-technological society requires either grade-A 1930s Japan-can’t-build-good-planes racism or belief in fairies.
A successful weapons control program either delays the other guy’s progress or convinces him that he doesn’t want to make progress – absolute prevention through antagonism is a myth and it always has been.