Hanson has really gone down hill.
Life is about choices.
Given time, North Korea will have missiles with multiple warheads, and those missile will reach as far as NYC or Miami. What will stop such technological advances? Left to their own devices, North Korea will achieve this.
I say we take out North Korea in whatever way seems best. Certainly we want to minimize damage to South Korea. But we must recognize that there will be damage to South Korea. Lots of damage.
I’ve seen film of how we liberated France from the Nazis. We broke France pretty good. Lots of damage. We didn’t want to break France, but we accepted that as a necessary outcome of the fight against the Nazis. War is hell. We cannot live with a nuclear North Korea, so South Korea will suffer. Not a goal, but an inevitability.
Just as Israel has every right to take preemptive action in her defense, the USA has every right to strike NoKor first to protect ourselves.
We don’t need approval of any other country or the United Nutjobs to take action as our Commander-in-Chief sees fit.
Although some do argue that allowing Pyongyang to hit our insane left coast first before finishing North Korea off would be a win-win for us Americans...
For America, would the loss of San Francisco really be so bad?
Is San Francisco America?
Regarding North Korea, if a dozen or so individuals were exterminated, the problems would dissapate
kil the fat little maniac and destroy their nuke program....
THE ONLY RATIONAL SOLUTION
most of the N Korean money goes to MILITARY and he has 1.7 million soldiers..
but they dont ahve FOOD or a real economy...
why let someone develop a weapon to then blackmail you with...or actually use it...
I would liek to thank Bill Clinton who endorsed and promoted the N Korean nuke program as wellas giving Loral space technology to China in return for illegal campaign contributions from the PLA... and thus the seeds of the current dilema were sown back then and no one has had the balls to put an end to it.. China likes having a nuke proxy... while pretending not to be able to stop it... Obama let China build ocean bases and expand their infuence... again this should ahve been stopped immediately. So in each case submissive behavior has gnerated bigger problems.. face the music and use the HAMMMER on this little fat cockroach...
To be perfectly honest, it is not a North Korean ICBM with a nuclear warhead that worries me. We have defenses to that that out.
What worries me is the availability of North Korean nuclear weapons to terrorist groups and other rouge regimes. A nuclear weapon can be set off in a container ship in one of our harbors NOW. That is why North Korea must phyically be stopped now.
Remember about 6 years ago, the Israelis bombed a Syrian port. It was reported that a convoy with Nork nuclear weapons and personel were headed to Hamas or Asad. It almost happened there.
Our best weapons are financial tools to cut off the flow of money for development of weapons to North Korea
However, most of their weapons development funding comes from Iran and Obama gave Iran 150 billion dollars plus another 400 million dollars secretly in the form of untraceable pallets of cash.
Obama’s horrible Iran deal both enables the Iranian and North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and undermines our best and possibly only tool for dealing with the North Korea's nuclear and other WMD proliferation programs
After some agonizing about this and the appearance that nothing is being done we will find out that Trump has it under control and we probably won’t be doing a military strike. The answer is in Peking, not Pyongyang. Trump is dealing with this
We are in much the same pickle as Roosevelt during the run-up to WWII. He knew that it was enevitable that we would get in the game. However, he also knew that he couldn’t get ahead of the American people as many still had bad memories about being pulled into WWI and thereby did not support being involved in another foreign war. But, Japan handed him a gift by attacking Pearl Harbour as it created outrage and a cry for revenge across the country. Then, a few days after, Hitler handed him another gift by declaring war on the U.S. So, the best we can hope for regarding North Korea is that it will hand us a gift that will provide a clear existential reason to strike North Korea’s leadership, nuclear, and other military/industrial structures and completely destroy their military capability. Hopefully, the causal event will have minimal loss of life. I’m thinking the best we could hope for would be for North Korea to do something really stupid such as fire a neuclear tipped rocket at Japan or South Korea and that it be intercepted and destroyed in mid-flight by one of our missiles. But, we shall see ...
The policy of mutually assured destruction would probably work just fine for now. In other words, you hit us, we demolish you and your regime. Kim is a thug, not an ideologue. The sole purpose of his posturing is to convince us that he’s insane enough to use nuclear weapons, which of course he’s not.
sell Nukes to Taiwan, Japan, S. Korea, Jordan, Latvia. Do not threaten to do so, do it. That will get the attention of China and Russia.
If we don't take a military action option, then we are going to continue to play the game with NK. They will bluster and threaten and continue their nuclear weapons and long range missile programs. We will continue to develop, refine, and deploy our missile defenses. We have a pretty good lead over them in that area and are pulling away. When NK finally recognizes that their threats are losing effectiveness, they will begin looking into arming terrorist groups, or sneaking warheads into the US via other means (not ICBMs). Before that happens gee, we might have to get serious about border security, imagine that.
If we take any kind of direct military action SK almost certainly suffers. It is just a question of how much. There are multiple options and scenarios, with different potential outcomes, but in all of them SK takes a pretty good hit.
The real problem here isn't NK with nuclear weapons or missiles etc. There are nine countries acknowledged to have nuclear weapons. That means 7 that aren't the US or NK. Funny thing, we're not terribly concerned with those other 7. Sure, Pakistan is a little troubling as their weapons could fall into the hands of violent religious extremists/terrorists... But you really don't hear too many people fretting over these other 7 nuclear-armed countries.
The problem is NK's leader. Most of the technologically advanced countries have a reasonable means of selecting leadership. Leaders rise to power through some demonstrable level of intelligence and capability. But in some cases, such as NK, that's not how it works. Their current leader has virtually no resume for being the leader of a nuclear-armed country. His only real accomplishment is that his father was the dictator. That's it, he just happens to be the right guy's kid. The frightening thing is, some kids are a**holes. Especially those who grow up relatively privileged in their society. They tend to develop some very warped priorities and values. That's who is running NK with his finger on the button. Some jerk-off who may or may not have any kind of moral compass, compassion, rationality, etc. He could be the kid who went and read to seniors at the local assisted living home...or he could be that one who pulls the wings off butterflies and enjoys taking smaller kids' lunch money. And now he wants nuclear weapons and more power, more prestige.
That's why he's a problem. Perhaps the best option may be a limited strike - a single US nuclear weapon aimed squarely at him. Then we take our chances with the surviving generals - tell them put a rational actor in charge, or else. If you attack SK, we have nuclear weapons aimed at you too, we can have this same conversation with one of your Colonels...
Sometimes you have to kill the enemy
To say we can’t take this thug out is insane and seals the fate of millions in American cities and our allies. North Korea will eventually succeed in their ultimate goal of successfully fielding nuclear capabilities that can reach the USA and that includes sneaking one in a container ship. Thanks to former a-hole presidents there are at least two countries (North Korea and Iran) who are insane enough to not only be willing to use them but successfully help a terror organization to do the dirty work.