You're right, stuff like this is just paranoia and nothing to really be concerned with.



Look it's most likely that NK's whole playbook is just designed to keep those in power, in power. Justify the sacrifices day to day people have to make to keep the higher ups fat and the defence budget big. But You don't have the privilege of calling the South Koreans or the Israelis paranoid when you don't live in either country. Live under that cloud for say 5 years and then report back. We'll see if you have the big daddy nuts you wave around on the internet

this is true. a Trump slappy is the Director at the top. i need to do some research on the CIA. how is the CIA structured? are there different silos within the agency? my thinking is a small, patriotic group within the CIA can run a mission without knowledge/clearance from the very top. that needs to be the game plan by a small group of agents.

Tillerson: President Trump is sending a strong message to North Korea, in language Kim Jong-Un can understand.

Yeah, he understood it so well that Guam is on nuclear alert right now.

Here are my thoughts:

1) A world in which NK has the capability to deliver a nuclear weapon from long range (let's call that "nuclear NK") is certainly intolerable to the US, and probably intolerable to most of Europe and Asia as well. This would be true almost no matter who the US president was.

2) The mere possibility of military conflict with NK is not, in and of itself, an indictment of Trump.

3) Trump is acting impulsively, or at best, on instinct when he makes wild threats against NK. Anyone who thinks that Trump is following some sort of well-considered strategy is delusional.

4) Situations sometimes resolve themselves for reasons that have nothing to do with the rash threats.

5) Regardless of why a situation gets resolved, casual observers and partisan supporters are likely to attribute the resolution to "tough" foreign policy. Trump is certain to make the same mistake because he is narcissistic, completely lacking in introspection, and no student of history. This will increase the risk of him making similar rash decisions in the future.

6) These situations do not arise often enough for any individual president to learn through trial and error, which is the only way that Trump can possibly learn any sort of lesson.

7) if a truly grave situation develops, such as a massive attack on SK, Japan, or Guam, terror is the correct emotional response. The US has never had a president who was less prepared to respond to such a situation than Trump.

The US has lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation for 60 years, coming a hair's breadth away from it happening at least a couple times.

RE: Rococo

Right. In a world with an gravely dangerous emerging situation where the primary cause isn't really Trump's fault, it's just a horrendous bad beat we elected an imbecile and we're in this position with a completely unprepared buffoon in charge.

I'm not sure whether you are actually agreeing with me or being snarky. I'm certainly not giving the electorate a free pass for electing Trump.

The leaders of Russia nor the US wanted to completely destroy or be destroyed. Can the same be said of NK and Iran leaders?

I agree with you. No snark. I'm being slightly dismissive of the liberal point this is all Trump's fault, but being very sincere when I say it's still a total holistic **** up by America to elect this guy.

Sure. And if you look back at that time, people were building bomb shelters in their back yards and schools were teaching kids how to hide under their desks or evacuate.

But in the modern day, there is no such constant threat hanging over the heads of American citizens. This is the closest we've come to it since you or I has been alive.

Yeah, it's a shame the founding fathers foresaw this development back in 1789 and wrote who controls the nuclear arsenal into the Constitution. Damn tricky bastards got us again.

Uh, yes?

Ffs you are dumb.

Peak speed for an ICBM is in the ballpark of 6-7km/s (any faster and the payload would go orbital), and it takes about 10 minutes to accelerate to that speed. New York to Moscow is 7500km, at 6.5km/s is ~20 minutes. Add in the acceleration time and you're looking at about 30 minutes total

ya I dont think we are shooting one of these out of the air.

and even if somehow it was possible, what would be the impact of nuclear warhead going off in the atmosphere? proly not a good thing.

Got it.

This situation has been developing for a long time. I was generally supportive of Obama, but his policy on NK basically amounted to kicking the can. That said, I'm not sure what a more effective policy would have looked like, which is probably what led Obama to kick the can in the first place.

Throughout the election, I thought that voters and the media largely ignored the possibility that Trump would have to deal with a crisis. It was always my biggest fear.

Good judgment, a cool head, the ability to take advice (and sift through conflicting advice), a good understanding of the facts, and a sense of history are critical in a foreign policy crisis, and Trump doesn't have any of those qualities.

As you say, he is an imbecile.

Oh really? The Kim rulers of NK talk tough, but they haven't bombed another country in over 50 years. By contrast Trump had already bombed one less than five months into office.

Literally nothing about Trump indicates he's capable of any restraint whatsoever. He comes across as a ticking time bomb.

No doubt he sees that 50% approval for military action, compares it to his own approval rating and puts 2 and 2 together.

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Why not? Rhetoric? The US and Russia have had rhetoric. Wars too. Lots of them.

It's happened plenty of times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High...lear_explosion

For the Trumpists in this thread, it doesn't matter what Trump is ACTUALLY doing with NK (even though any hopes of an actual "plan" being in place here are very wishful thinking). The mere fact that we can't rule out Trump using this to try and stall/divert investigations into him and his team should petrify you to no end.

If he even raises the Defcon level I'd expect people to start talking about the 25th amendment.

Yes it can actually.

And for what it's worth there were plenty of Hawks throughout history who advocated for first strikes, both in the USSR and the USA. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed.

But Trump ain't no cool head.

http://listverse.com/2010/11/28/8-po...uclear-scares/

I was alive for three of these. We're constantly at risk of accidental annihilation.

The NK problem is not so much about NK attacking the US i think, hes desperate to remain in power so he likely wont do that. Its more about proliferation, the more you go towards allowing others to have nukes and ballistics the more countries will want to have them, like a negative spiral. E.g now Japan and South korea might feel the need to defend themselves against the NK having more advanced nuclear capabilities. Also Iran sees that NK gets nukes so they might be more inclied to get them too. The world is not going to be safer with everyone having nukes, at some point a state will elect ("elect") a crazy terrorist that wants to blow stuff up or hand off nukes to terrorists, or terrorists just seize power via a coup and now they have nukes. So its more the direction we are headed that is problematic i think and not so much NK having nukes in itself.

I dont think a war is any good idea of course. Not sure if the US can even afford that (?) and the casualties will be huge according to what i read.

MAD (mutually assured destruction) had plenty to do why neither country would opt for a first strike more than cooler heads.

Yeah but there wasn't a truly confirmed MAD situation until probably the mid 70s

Nobody should be launching that many nukes (enough for MAD to trigger) at once regardless of what NK does.

And I'm not sure the US needs to launch any either.

As I understand, the Arrow defense system has been working pretty well, and SK was talking to Israel about it as early as 2009.

SK itself has been working on the Citron ABM system since 2006.