North Korea about to launch ICBM test and/or space satellite

[BobG]

North Korea would simply need to increase the accuracy of their missiles and then target the oil installations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwayt and Iraq and the strategic oil reserves in the US to win a war against the West. And they can do that with only conventional warheads.

If the West runs out of oil, it is defeated. We would then need to sit down with Kim and negotiate an end to attacks on oil intallations.

They'd have to increase their range and altitude, as well. Saudi Arabia is about 4600 miles away, meaning their missile would have to reach an altitude of around 920 miles. Re-entry into the atmosphere will hurt their accuracy.

Edit: It wouldn't be that much harder for them to hit Los Angeles. (6000 mile range, 825 mile altitude).

I don't think that's feasible any time soon.

 

[russ_watters]

Hmm... but can you imagine any realistic scenario?

Since when has that stopped an insane megalomaniac?

 

[russ_watters]

Yes yes, and every country in the world which has won a war described their actions as defensive. Russ don't try to fool us, we (europeans) have been fighting for thousands of years. We know all excuses in the book. Or at least show some imagination and figure out new ones.

misgfool, I'm not trying to fool anyone, I'm not making judgements, I'm just explaining issues and logic. We have hindsight and distance, so we don't have to listen to what the starters of wars said, we can make our own judgements and look at how experts judge. And the fact of the matter is that history and political scientists, diplomats sitting around the UN assembly, etc draw the lines that I described and the majority draw the moral conclusions I draw. I'm not making this stuff up. The concept and philosophical exporation of Just War is thousands of years old and is in practice today. You may want to read up on the concept before dismissing it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war

In any case, the issue I as discussing was a very specific one and doesn't have anything to do with who started what war and what they used as an excuse, I am merely explaining the reasoning actually used to take action in cases like the one in question. I didn't say in that quote whether the reaoning is right or wrong (that's part of Just War, but I wasn't discussing it specifically), I was just explaining what the reasoning is.

I've also cited general examples that really happened, but maybe you haven't heard of them. In 1981, for example, the cat-and-mouse game resulted in the shootdown of two Libyan fighters by the US Navy. Now whether the US was right or wrong is not what I'm addressing. I'm simply stating the reason that they were shot down. They were shot down because they passed the point where our defenses could easily repel an attack if one of them actually released a weapon. They had not passed the point of no return (release of a weapon without callback). The decision was made that rather than let them get to where they could launch an attack, they should be stopped before they got there. The space between those lines is where the grey area I described resides. That grey area causes a lot of controversy.

And you think that, he believes, that there will be no repercussions?

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't. If he's insane, that means his judgement is flawd. See Hussein, 1990, for a similar example of a disastrous miscalculation by an unstable megalomaniac dictator.

So why doesn't he do it even just for the pleasure of doing it?

Besides what was already said (not much pleasure if it doesn't hit its target), the incentive goes up with the despiration. He tends to ratchet up the rhetoric at times when he is the most desperate - back him into a corner he believe he has no chance to get out of and he may just choose to go out with a bang.

 

[russ_watters]

"Insane megalomaniac" might be an overstatement...

Yes, it is an overstatement, and I'm not saying he is, I'm just saying we have to consider that he might be - just like I said we also have to consider that he is completely rational and is playing us.

...but how willing is Kim Jong-Il to stay barely on this side of irrationality vs stray barely on the other side - i.e. be willing to wager that the rest of the world isn't ready to start tossing nukes back and forth even when they'd win. Being capable of irrationality can be hugely intimidating to other people.

Right, we are in a transitional phase in world diplomacy here, mixing cold war and post cold war logic. Reagan really did scare the Ruskies. They believed he might be willing to launch 10,000 nukes at them if they annoyed him enough. Scaring people is a good way to get them to negotiate with you.

But post-cold war, the other side of a single-nuke threat (us), doesn't need to and likely wouldn't choose a full nuclear spread as a response. It is no longer morally acceptable. We'd probably send every conventional resource we have at him and take him out the way we did Hussein, but we almost certainly wouldn't nuke his cities. We don't have anything against the Koreans, just their leader.

And the results might be better than that for North Korea. Probably not, but it's always possible. Kim wouldn't be the first to lose a high stakes poker game with the rest of the world. In fact, as ill advised as the Iraq invasion might have been, proving we could make stupid decisions might give Kim more pause than an image of perfectly rational thought would.

Agreed. In essense, Bush was a bad poker player who convinced himself that Hussein still had WMDs. Hussein apparently wasn't bluffing, but in this game, that doesn't always result in a win. Kim didn't scare Bush, so Bush didn't negotiate with him. And Kim must have realized that if Bush detected a serious threat (even one that existed only in his own head), he wouldn't hesitate to act. And that can give even an insane megalomaniac pause.

Now we have an extreme pacifist in the Oval Office, though, and this may have been timed as a test. Whereas Kim may have believed he shouldn't push Bush too far, he may already be stretching his (admittedly short) legs with Obama.

 

[mheslep]

Yes yes, and every country in the world which has won a war described their actions as defensive...

The history of war is overwhelmingly the opposite: most of it has been point blank offensive threats of annihilation demanding tribute and submission from less powerful peoples. The defensive war, just or otherwise, is in the minority.