Good thing they did, sounds better than the alternative. Are you saying we can we expect a similar rosy future for Iraq and Afghanistan as we see today with South Korea? Nice.
Iraq maybe. Afghanistan, historically unlikely.
Thatâs not very true, the reason NK has nukes now is because in 2002 Bush declared them an enemy to America publicly after a dragged out diplomatic process was frustrating all sides and NK withdrew entirely and openly pursued nuclear arms performing their first test in 2006. The US didnât remove NK from the terrorist list until 2008, and handed over documents stating their capabilities at the time. There have been several talks with NK saying it wonât disarm without the US disarming, and the US saying it wonât accept anything less than NK abandoning its entire nuclear program.
Then in 2010 Korean unification was withdrawn by South Korea after a moderately successful few year stint that reunited families and allowed movement over the border. Leadership changed in SK partially based on ending the agreement after many back and forth talks with both sides being unhappy.
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No, thatâs not very true. Six months after Bushâs âaxis of evilâ speech, the agreement was still in place, the US was building the North Koreans a civilian nuclear reactor, and the North Koreans had agreed to extend their ballistic missile testing moratorium (though also during this time they were selling missile technology to Iran and Yemen, hardly conducive to good relations with the US, which resulted in further sanctions from the US). Before the end of the year however the US had found out about their secret uranium enrichment program, in breach of the agreement, North Korea were engaged in gunboat diplomacy with the Japanese (threatening them with restarting their missile program if they didnât agree to their normalization terms, there was also the issue of the kidnapped Japanese citizens), they then caught them selling missiles to Saddam. Despite all this the US was still willing to stick with the agreement (though they suspended parts of it due to the enrichment program), but at the end of the year the Koreans kick all the inspectors out and publicly restart their nuclear program. I doubt they ever had any real intention of sticking to the agreement (why secretly enrich uranium otherwise?), they were just seeing how much they could extract out of the US before they got their bomb.
The notion of the US disarming is a ridiculous nonstarter, are China and Russia going to do the same, the rest of the world? Not going to happen. This doesnât provide justification for every other country in the world to develop their own nuclear weapons.
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Yeah, what you just said is that after the US publicly declared NK a part of the Axis of Evil they restarted their nuclear enrichment program after the US had been working with them on the ground for, what, 5 years by that point? Thatâs how diplomacy works - if you have an agreement but decide to literally declare another nation evil, they are probably going to break the agreement because you literally called them evil.
And the point about disarming is that itâs too late. North Korea has nuclear capabilities on the level of other nuclear powers, so a one-sided disarmament is a nonstarter for the same reason it is to the United States.
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No, that isnât what I said at all. I said they uncovered the program six months or so after Bushâs speech (or more accurately revealed that they knew about it then, they had known about it for months before that). Thereâs no evidence they ever stopped enrichment, and it was most likely going on long before Bush made his speech and suspicions around their flouting of the agreement was probably a large part of the reason for that speech (it wasnât taking place in locations that had been disclosed to the inspectors, obviously, it wouldnât have been much of a secret otherwise, and they couldnât have gotten it up and running that quickly).
No they donât, and no it isnât. They have a pretty limited ability to produce warheads, their missile program is still a long way behind everyone else, and their yields arenât at the same level as the other major world powers; they have many years of research and testing ahead before they could come close to being on the same level.
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NK had facilities capable of creating weapons the entire time, it is super easy once you have the equipment to start it back up again, and the intelligence community at the time only went public with recent evidence after the Axis of Evil speech. It basically just takes quality centrifuges for enrichment, which they possessed and was in contention since 1994 when the US knew NK had the capability.
NKâs recent test puts them ahead of everyone but the US, UK, Russia, and China and they have intercontinental rockets so I guess you are technically correct by using âother major world powersâ which excludes India, Pakistan, etc.
So now youâre not saying they only started enriching after the speech, youâre just blaming the US for making it public then?
Look, the US made some mistakes during the whole process (there were delays with the building of the LWR, though that was understandable, building a nuclear reactor is complicated, and there were some delays with deliveries of oil that had been promised, along with Bush not helping - but NK is hardly temperate in its public statements either, to put it mildly), but all I was calling you on was your suggestion that the US was âthe primary antagonistic force against NK reaching a peace treatyâ, which is just bulshit.
The primary reason was the fact that they really really wanted to build a nuclear bomb, in contravention to two separate agreements they had entered into, one of which wasnât even with the US, so US statements on the matter shouldnât have much relevance, as long as they werenât directly threatening them, which they werenât; they werenât valid justifications for them pulling out of the agreement. Do you honestly believe they were genuinely committed to it in the first place?
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Iâm not blaming the US for making it public, Iâm saying that their evidence also came from after the speech.
And you are right, NK does have a prime directive to build a bomb and is perfectly willing to return to the development at the drop of a hat. Doesnât change the fact that the US has been the primary antagonistic force against NK reaching a peace treaty. Both can and do easily exist at the same time, just like saying the US is why ISIS exists and why terrorism and Islamic radicalization has spiked in the west.
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Iâm not blaming the US for making it public, Iâm saying that their evidence also came from after the speech.
They presented the evidence after the speech, do you have a source for them only discovering it afterwards? AFAIK there were rumours around for a while (from the previous year) that they were in breech, the US didnât actually publicise it until after NK admitted they were doing it, which initially they had denied.
Yes it does change that, NK is the prime reason, US has made genuine efforts to reach a solution, despite occasional cockups. and the US is not why ISIS exists either, nor is it the prime reason why Islamic radicalization has spiked in the west.
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Interesting podcast on US military culture and demographics.
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Is there nothing millenials wonât kill?
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Owns? I think the boy has learned his propaganda well, and Evan Osnos had better things to do than risk his presence in the country by arguing.
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Lest we forget other hot spots in the world while focusing on the Korean Peninsula, this looks like it could cause a real problem where problems already exist:
And the Catalanâs have an independence vote upcoming, too.
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Thereâs been a fair bit of action in Kurdistan over the last week.
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Yup, that kid has been soaking in propaganda for his whole life. Just like everyone else.
So why is America trying to provoke a war? And what right does the US have to prevent the Koreans from defending themselves? It is very obvious that a nuclear deterrent is the only sure way to prevent a US invasion.
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Which Koreans?
If Kim Jung Un feels slighted, millions of South Koreans will die (artillery strikes)
millions of Japanese will die (Tokyoâs a good spot for a Sarin attack, isnât it?)
millions of Los Angelenos will die (nukes)
The cost of defense is rather high.
