When Nobody Knows( The New Multipolar Proliferated World,...)

When Nobody Knows(The New Multipolar Proliferated World, Where Nobody Knows the Rules)

After a slow start, North Korean nuclear weapons engineers seem to making definite progress. The intervals between successive nuclear tests are getting shorter while the yields obtained are becoming more consistent. Incremental improvements are also being achieved in their missile systems.

North Korea represents a crisis in strategy. We desire the ends but are ignorant of the means. The intellectual tools of the old bipolar world are no longer a sure guide to attaining stability. Nuclear proliferation has undermined great powers, even America's rivals, because it has destroyed their veto power over Armaggedon, a prerogative arguably more important than starting it. In a proliferated world, no one completely rules the roost, not even Russia or China working in concert. The joker is wild.

A new nuclear policy: an unstable country newly developing nuclear weapons will be destroyed pre-emptively with a first strike.

Brutal, but it would end the immediate problem and discourage other countries from trying to obtain nukes, since acquiring nukes would invite an attack instead of being a deterrent.

North Korea represents a crisis in strategy. We desire the ends but are ignorant of the means.

A pithy summation of our dilemma about Korea. The risks of nuclear retaliation by Korea of any strike make a military solution very, very dangerous indeed. If president Trump's diplomatic initiative in which he has enlisted China fails, we are in a very bad situation indeed. The problem is, China and North Korea have played this game before in which North Korea as one member of the tagteam acts out permitting China to extract trade concessions from us in exchange for bringing pressure on North Korea.

In a proliferated world, no one completely rules the roost, not even Russia or China working in concert. The joker is wild.

Yet an autocratic country has a decided advantage in a nuclear standoff situation. The democratic countries, as we so dramatically saw in the Reagan era when he proposed installing missiles in Europe causing millions of protesters to erupt into the streets, are vulnerable to a burgeoning leftist mentality which will scream for surrender. This is why a nuclear Iran is so dangerous, because a few atomic explosions from an identified source in American or European cities might well bring about surrender to sharia. Certainly, the threat of nuclear war with either Russia or China, puts us in an unequal contest in which our domestic politics pushes for surrender while autocrats carry on free, or largely free, of public opinion.

Good points. There would be a push for surrender.

If someone like me was president, the retaliatory strike for American and European cities getting nuked would be to wipe out every city from Nigeria to Pakistan, along with Bangledesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. The Islamic world would become an instant funeral pyre.

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