Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/06/north-korea-denuclearization.html
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I’m skeptical on a whole bunch of fronts but, since it’s unlikely the DPRK can ever go away except from within, a crazy non-nuclear dictatorship is at least a bit better than a crazy nuclear dictatorship.
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They’d be silly to accept any assurances or expect the US to honor anything it signs under the current president, given how we’re breaking treaties left and right. They must know that, which makes me wonder what’s going on here.
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I guess if the whole point of nuclear weapons is deterrence, it’s sort of pointless to build deterrents when the guy with the most bombs is demonstrably unhinged enough to use them regardless.
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Right? My immediate thought was “There’s no way North Korea is stupid enough to think that the US would honor an agreement like that, especially under this administration”
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Trump’s tweet was also somewhat disconcerting. “Ready to go hard in either direction!” Even in reconcilliation, he’s still connotes a threat. On the other hand, it can easily be interpreted as, “Ready to go hard both ways!” ie, as if he’s in a bi threesome. Trump, Kim Jong Un and who else… hhhmmmm… “I’ll take KellyAnne Conway for 200 Bob!”
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We don’t have any sanctions agains unified Korea, do we?
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I’m skeptical.
Yet, maybe the North is simply running out of cash and scavenged bits and bobs from old Soviet rockets to continue; hard to continue building ICBMs with virtually no parts worth a dime.
It happens, countries slithering into bankruptcy from the top down like that, looking at you East Germany.
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Considering what we know about Kim and Trump, I’ll believe it when I see it.
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How long will that logic hold though?
We’re on the brink of seeing many “second tier” countries like South Korea, Japan, etc building nukes. In Europe, with England exiting the UK, Germany may build them to counter France (not militarily, but so they don’t have undue influence by being able to threaten to exit NATO and leave the continent defenseless)
I think we’re going to see a period of a decade or two where smaller nations arm themselves, followed by at least one small nuclear exchange as these countries try and fail to deter invasion with a few nukes
Good thing we have a President who is willing to take credit for what he worked so hard to ruin.
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It only took one president’s duplicity, bluster, blame-shifting and attention whoring to remind the two Koreas that maybe the other wasn’t so bad after all.
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It’s pretty commonly accepted that the Japanese have already long since built everything necessary to have a simple nuclear weapon with the exception of the fissile material. Precision machining the plutonium core would only be a matter of weeks if not days, and they’d have a simple fission bomb. You’d also be silly to think that any designs they had for such also couldn’t be used as the initiator in a thermonuclear bomb.
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The US has a terrible record of honoring its promises and treaties. Just ask the original inhabitants of North America.
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It may be simple math.
NK doesn’t really need the nukes unless it invades SK (the ability to conventionally destroy SK won’t go away). In which case, if NK spent, let’s say 10 billion to acquire the nukes, and the US pays them, say $50b (in whatever round about way is necessary) to get rid of them, then it’s win-win.
Dear Leader is 40b richer and free of sanctions to spend it on his own private Disneyland, and the US president looks like a hero for averting WW III.
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Wow, I didn’t take it that way. I was envisioning him doing the “wobbly H” with Kim Jong Un and Dennis Rodman…
Not Ivanka?
NK nukes are for the purpose of deterring the very real threat of US invasion. Kim is unlikely to trade them for cash.
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My guess is that an offer will be something like “we will dismantle our nukes in exchange for USA closing their bases in South Korea”.
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NK has had the same offer on the table for decades. All they have ever asked for is that we stop having a giant war game off their cost every damned year. This is what they mean by “it would have no reason to keep nuclear weapons if the military threat to the North was eliminated and its security guaranteed”
Step back and think about it for a moment. What would we do if Russia sent a carrier group and submarines to have a mock invasion of the U.S. every single year? What if that went on for decades? NK has wanted this to end for a long time and these war games are the primary reason NK developed nuclear capability in the first place.
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