I think it’s more about maintaining the status quo. Their internal propaganda follows the 1984 “perpetual war” model, right down to the loudspeakers on every street corner. They need the populace to believe that they’re struggling bravely against the whole world to make them accept the conditions that they’re living in, and to justify shutting them off from the outside world. People risk torture and execution to smuggle in DVDs full of what we’d consider crappy home-improvement shows, labelled contraband propaganda by the NK state because it shows a standard of living beyond belief for the average citizen.
Externally (and @renke got there just before me), a nuclear threat is about the only thing they have to bring to the table. So they talk about crushing their puny enemies underfoot but that’s for the benefit of their own populace. Really I think the ruling class, and especially the Kim family, are just trying to hold on to what they’ve got.
America’s next Commander-in-Chief will have complex new Pyongyang problems on their plate.
I see what you did here, trying to suggest the election is a big important decision and that lives depend on voters taking it seriously. YOU MUST REALLY HATE FREEDOM
So… what is the deal? A shitty country with a shitty technology is still making test on nuclear weapons. Even if they got it right all they have to deliver the payload arel shitty as hell north korean knock offs of Chinese knock offs of decades old soviet missiles.
I’m more worried of Trump seizing the biggest functional nuclear arsenal in the world.
The real threat to humankind is blonde and have tiny hands.
Because the US nowadays likes to pick fights that look like easy wins - few casualties and won in a year or so. Can’t do much strutting around and chests-thumping when the war is going to look like another vietnam.
Iran shouldn’t be considered a rogue state “just because Americans have a grudge”. They have long abandoned their '80s shenanigans and now behave pretty much like any other country with regional ambitions. In fact, they behave much better than the likes of Saudi Arabia (see Yemen) or Turkey (ISIS support), let alone China (militarily occupying straits here and there and everywhere) and Israel (let’s not even go there).
There is no way to appease the DPRK; as others said, their whole elite survives on the principle that they are alone fighting the whole world, so they can never soften their stance without collapsing irreparably.
The only player in this game is China. Things have to turn in such a way that China will see the DPRK as a threat so big that they have to take action, rather than a useful variable they can periodically exploit. The final outcome might not be great for Koreans, but it should remove some volatility.
He gets his shirts so white with tributyl phosphate! That was the real reason North Korea imported tons of the stuff from China. The fact that it can also be used in uranium extraction is just a coincidence.
Nope. The more energetic second shockwave will rapidly overtake the first. There isn’t a fixed ‘speed of sound’ for shockwaves. The only way you could confuse things is to surround a small nuke with lots of crushable stuff, bags of water, even bubble-wrap (really!). Or if you had you had lots of voids in the ground, that might disrupt the shockwaves. People thought about that at length then the test ban treaty was drawn up. It is hard to make the shear wave of real earthquakes, but you might be able to make the P-wave less distinctive. But it really is not practical for something above about half a kiloton.
Of course, the other thing that confuses the issue is to make a cock of their nuke test. If they are trying to make an H-bomb, then their A_bomb driver geometry has to be compromised, and that may mean it has gone off phut.
Great line, other than the small detail that men are “blond”, not “blonde” (hey, I don’t make the rules, I just had them burned into my brain in the 60’s and 70’s, back when rote learning was a thing).
I think the problem is that dirty bombs are even worse than the conventional kind, which means the equivalent in nuclear materials is a huge problem…maybe not directly for the U.S., because as you say they don’t have the capacity to fly it over to us properly, but South Korea is a major democracy and everyone’s ally and doesn’t deserve what would happen to them FIRST. Also, if any of the fallout/error in execution lands in China, then you’ve got the world’s most populous country, which is in the process of major cultural/political redefining, reacting in ways that cannot be 100% predetermined (yay, human nature).
North Korea is like that guy who lives in a trailer who is on welfare and whose kids don’t have winter coats, but his POS Camero has new rims and he has a PS4 with the newest DLC for what ever game he is playing. Probably Call of Duty.
Uhm, one could say the same of the US really. How many prisoners? People under poverty line? People who can’t afford seeing a doctor? School drop-out rates? But the military is top-notch and gotta have the best fighter jets. Someone said something about stones in glass houses…
Well, one could argue we spend too much on the military, but we also spend a shit one on social security, medicare, medicaid, and other programs. WAY more on programs like that than the military spending. And while we still have some homeless and hungry in the US, it isn’t a direct result of systemic oppression from a cult like dictatorship.
This sentence during GWB reign would have been ironic in the Morrissette sense but even today (and tomorrow under President Trump) the US have quite a lot of systemic issues that get deprioritized to favour corporation welfare. That banking DLC requires lots of addons.
but even today (and tomorrow under President Trump) the US have quite a lot of systemic issues that get deprioritized to favour corporation welfare. That banking DLC requires lots of addons.