I know we’re all feeling a mix of dread and horror about tragedy on an unprecedented scale, and (depending on where you are in the world) the chance of being caught up in it. But for those of us here in the U.S., it’s pretty safe that we will not experience “forthcoming nuclear devastation of America and the radioactive immolation of the last and greatest of human dreams”.
North Korea is not the Soviet Union. They’re not even China. Odds are very good that they’re not even Israel. It is a relatively small target, and the U.S. is a large, spread-out, heavily armed target. This is not the typical case we’ve planned for where nuclear war means mutually assured destruction.
The chance of them getting off a shot and hitting the continental U.S. are pretty slim. The odds of them doing it more than once are even slimmer. They cannot survive a conventional war. They sure as hell can’t survive a nuclear way. If the unthinkable does happen, there will still be people in America to wring their hands over what an unprecedented environmental, human, economic, and political disaster we’ve created.
