North Korea fired a suspected intermediate-range ballistic missile toward the sea on Sunday, South Korea’s military said, two months after the North claimed to have tested engines for a new harder-to-detect missile capable of striking distant U.S. targets in the region.
The launch was the North’s first this year. Experts say North Korea could ramp up its provocative missile tests as a way to influence the results of South Korea’s parliamentary elections in April and the U.S. presidential election in November.
Wonder how much of this is in response to US war hawks screeching about Iran and Yemen. It’s a pretty good deterrent for a nuclear capable country to say, “if you try anything on us we can target your cities.”
What’s there to deter? Anything NK could do to the US that would serve as a deterrent would immediately result in the US glassing Pyongyang. Lil Kim isn’t Putin. He doesn’t have a half-century of stockpiles to rattle at the US to pretend MAD is still a thing. And neither Putin nor Poohbear would lift a finger to stop it either, because NK’s friendship just isn’t that valuable, and it won’t be for another several decades of pouring the entire GDP into buildup, if ever. US war hawks don’t care about North Korea because they don’t have to.
A deterrent means they don’t strike first. The US remains the only country to strike first.
Citation needed.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
He means nukes
Please tell me how many countries have used nuclear weapons, and how many countries have invaded other countries with nuclear weapons.
So you’re suggesting that North Korea is demonstrating its ballistic missiles solely in order to deter the United States from unilaterally launching an unprovoked surprise nuclear strike against North Korea. …
Okay.
Let’s talk about this, I guess.
In the universe in which the US launches an unprovoked surprise nuclear attack against North Korea, I’d like to think we could all agree that the rest of the world, including other nuclear powers, would be united in retaliating, NK ballistic missiles or not. Sure, it’s not impossible that the US government could become irrational, but that’s I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that nuclear deterrence is about more than that.
Even allowing ad arguendo a Hiroshima-like escalation scenario, we don’t actually need the US’s nuclear arsenal to do that (see: Tokyo and Berlin bombing campaigns). That is to say–to the extent that NK being a nuclear power might play in an actual deterrence scenario, it’s redundant. In all other scenarios, we’re not using 1945 military doctrine anyway.
The US has invaded countries for made up reasons. See Iraq, 2003.
US bad. Got it.
Still waiting on those WMDs.
Because they built them first.
I prefer the US using them and then realizing it is too powerful than Nazis using it to conquer the rest of the world.
TIL there were Nazis in Hiroshima.
There was a lot more rhetoric against North Korea in the 00s until they confirmed having a nuke.
Care to elaborate?
The news at the time talked a lot about hostile nations which included “the axis of evil” that originally comprised of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea for whatever reason. More and more alarms were ringing about how they were going to get a nuke and how much of a problem they are, then they got a nuke and it’s been mostly silence except for the occasional news piece like this one. At the time it seemed like the US was ready to go to war with several countries in the name of fighting “terror”.
Exactly.
I think it’s just Guam they can hit with this rocket. The big news is it uses solid state rockets, those are harder to detect on radar.
Old fashioned spinning disk rockets are still best for media storage, though.
Like anyone would be interested in that shit hole.
Nuclear weapons work best if you don’t use them as a threat every other week.
Number of nuclear weapons in Iraq = 0. Number of times Iraq has been invaded = 2
Number of nuclear weapons in North Korea = >1. Number of times NK has been invaded = 0.