Laughing at Korea's Jong-Un's Zero Chance.

[Liv]

North Korea seems to be all the rage these days. Kim Jong-Un is the brunt of fat jokes on the comments of CNN, blogs, and other news outlets. Americans claim he's angry because "he's the only fat person in Korea", or that "he ate four other people". Then there's his threat's of striking the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. I've yet to read a single word from any expert suggesting it's possible, and civilians add into the joy by laughing at the matter. "The only thing Kim Jong-Un could hit is himself". Repeatively the words used by Americans is that he has "zero chance" of hitting U.S. soil.

Except American's aren't the brightest anyways, and they seem to suffer from a sort of Hubris where they believe they're superiority, and capability is nearly empowered by God himself. I've yet to hear a single person doubt this propaganda, this everyone is safe because we're awesomer then everyone else type of thinking.

...And perhaps they're right. Then again, far too many battles have been lost by hubris in the history of war, and the belief in an unstoppable their military.

Let me be frank, it's not a question of IF America will fall, it's a question of when. We could be brought down by a new world empire, or whimper away from economic collapse, or it could be some random crazy fat Korean name Jong-Un who fires a lucky shot, with a half-baked nuke, and gets lucky. The odds of winning the lotto, or being struck by lightning are astronomical, but yet it happens.

However, Korean's don't have to master missle technology, nor nuclear technology themselves. They simply need to inherit it from another country. Never doubt the possibility of a cold-war nuke (which there are thousands unaccounted for) landing in the hands of some crazy guy with a bad hair-cut.

Even if he can't, even if he doesn't, even if these are the same threats people say Korea has been making for decades, the threat of Nuclear war is not something we should ever consider there being a zero chance of, ask my friend Goliath about that.

[The Vicar]

Yep. North Korea could surprise us all by successfully launching a nuclear missile.

To me, though, the thing to worry about isn't "North Korea has a nuke" -- there are lots of countries which have had nuclear weapons now for decades. It's that North Korea's leadership appears to believe their own propaganda. If North Korea nuked pretty much anyone, the U.S. or Russia or South Korea or China or Japan, it would pretty much automatically have a few nuclear weapons dropped on it right away. I highly doubt the U.S. could manage another invasion, when the last two have turned out to be so disastrous, but I think also that the U.S. leadership wouldn't even bother. The U.S. military has wanted to use "tactical nukes" for decades, and this would be the chance they've been waiting for, a bona fide "defensive" strike. This would have terrible ramifications for centuries, but I don't think anyone in the chain of command actually desires any other outcome, and a recent poll showed that a majority of U.S. citizens -- and this is really frightening to realize -- are in favor of use nuclear weapons, and so North Korea's chances of survival really are zero if they give an excuse.

This doesn't apply to other countries, really; not even Iran, which the U.S. right wing desperately wants to attack so that we can steal their oil (now that Iraq turned out not to let us do that to them), is as isolated and friendless as North Korea has made itself.

[SouthernFriedInfidel]

A war in the Korean peninsula might be a bad idea, like it was last time... only I have to wonder if China would support Pyongyang this time around. China is no longer into Communism as it was back in the day, and they are doing pretty well at economic warfare against America, sucking wealth out of us at a pretty healthy rate... they don't need to piss off the source of that river of wealth flowing into its coffers. NK, if they were crazy enough to start a shooting war, would have a much harder row to hoe without the patronage they enjoyed in the 50's.

So Liv... who says there are any Cold War nukes "unaccounted for"? Just wondering...

[Liv]

Not my original source, but...

The collapse of the Soviet Union allowed for a warming of relations with NATO. Fears of a nuclear holocaust lessened. In September 1997, the former secretary of the Russian Security Council Alexander Lebed claimed 100 "suitcase sized" nuclear weapons were unaccounted for. He said he was attempting to inventory the weapons when he was fired by President Boris Yeltsin in October 1996.[14] In 2005, Sergey Sinchenko, a legislator from the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, said 250 nuclear weapons were unaccounted for. When comparing documents of nuclear weapons transferred from Ukraine to weapons received by Russia, there was a 250-weapon discrepancy.[15] Indeed, several US politicians have expressed worries and promised legislation addressing the threat.[16]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and ... estruction

I suspect it goes much further than this. Several accounts of "sales" in the Middle East for more elaborate ICBMs have been suggested over the years, and there's no doubt if you were once part of a the Russian richy rich club and are now starving, you're going to sell that truck with ballistic missiles sitting in your backyard you drove home on your last day.

Which is sort of what happened with weapons after WWI, leading to WWII- except your talking about nukes instead of rifles.