Hi ,i think South Korea and Japan would rather have all American bases closed down .

Would he start a war as distraction? If so, I doubt he would choose NK. Their nuclear deterrent will probably work.
He would rather go for ‘easier’ prey, i’d think.
Note that the US already is in 2 wars.

That is what I meant by ‘keeping their cool and remain stoic.’
Do not, repeat do not, strike, by drone or otherwise. NĶ is a mentally ill patient that should not be provoked.
It would be better to devise ways to inobtrusively get some information into the country.
(Like about the US ‘Civil Forfeiture’, something quite intelligible in a feudal state. The NĶ regime might even like it)/s

And 20 minutes later Beijing gets MIRVed? I’m not so sure:
1- the ballistic missile need not be nuclear. Will the ‘West’ start going nuclear? It seriously risks to come second best there at any rate.
2- China is not the only state with ballistic missiles at present,
and in context: NK is working hard on it. It is not rocket science (?), so, why Beijing?
3- even the military brass have come to the conclusion that MAD only works as posturing.
4- it hints at the notion that the military efficiency of a carrier group compares to that of a city.

Yes, a carrier group can annihilate (etc)…, like cavalry can annihilate a tribe armed with wood & flint clubs. (cf. the just post-Columbian history of the ‘New World’).

You maybe right about the napalm girl. It definitely opened many eyes and raised questions about what (and how) we were doing there.

I can fully agree with your last paragraph.

Just to make it clear, I was saying that bombing is a bad idea, even if it were possible.

By the way, it is highly unlikely that Trump could have avoided the Civil war when he apparently does not know what caused it. It has only been 150 years so may he will still find out some day.

Alas, I’m sure Drumpf would be far too quick to (correctly) realize that no bunker is “safe,” in practical terms, from a surface detonation of a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb. After the dust settles, you’ve got a half-kilometer-wide crater at the center of a firestorm an hundred kilometers across. Wether or not there’s a functioning bomb buried beneath such a literal hellhole is something of a moot point. And if you really don’t think a single blast is enough, we’ve got single ICBMs that could deliver a dozen such bombs in any pattern desired…and hundreds such ICBMs….

Of course, obviously, such an action on our part would escalate, in a matter of hours at the absolute most, into an unlimited global thermonuclear war.

But, here’s the catch.

Even a single US drone strike such as we routinely use against ISIS targets, even one that resulted in zero North Korean casualties and damaged nothing other than missile or bomb hardware…

…even something that “trivial” would result in the North unleashing a devastating conventional artillery attack on Seoul that would represent the opening moves in the resumption of the Korean War.

Our military is perfectly incapable of doing anything constructive in North Korea, and anything it might attempt would result in disaster of literally cataclysmic proportions.

If there is to be a solution, it’ll be one in which no shots are fired. Indeed, it’ll be one in which no shots are even seriously considered.

Cheers,

b&

I agree. I see those words as diplomatic-speak though. The US is allies with Saudi Arabia, but no longer with New Zealand (since 1970s) because our anti-nuke stance is “unacceptable”. In joint war games with multiple countries in Hawaii, the NZ fleet had to use a port on a different island to most of the others just last year.

Everyone seems a lot less keen on TPP now the US is gone. Better access to their economy was a big drawcard. It’s very protected, despite what Trump thinks. I’m not really sure what’s going on at the moment.

A few people have had problems, but unfortunately it’s not something I can fix. It’s a WordPress thing – as you say “it’s glitchy”.

All excellent points. Also, the party likely to win the South Korean election is less sympathetic to the US (especially now Trump is in charge) and more keen to have good relations with the north. We have to remember that huge numbers of families were split by the partition and many of those just want to find a way to have contact again.