We’re getting ready to invade Iraq with 1/4 of Britain and Bulgaria. Bin Laden’s back and beefing up the ratings himself. Code Orange, not to be confused with Agent Orange, has been declared. Iran’s restarted its nuclear development programe. Nato’s disintigrating. And now, oh by the way, the unclassified answer is, yes, Korea does have an untested nuclear capable missile capable of reaching the west coast of the United States.
I dunno, but am I the only one not convinced we’re on top of things?
What the hell are we suspossed to do? If NK has nukes then we could be looking at World War 3 if Pyongyang is provoked. And what about China? Are we going to attack them as well? Yea… I guess that’s our answer.
China is actually the best deterrant for Kim Jong Il.
It’s their backyard really, I can see why they’d be reluctant to allow more US movements that close to their territory. That’s diplomatic par for the course.
The estimate is not new – it was laid out in an unclassified CIA document in December 2001-- but Tenet is the most senior U.S. official to say so publicly.
The 2001 report said North Korea’s Taepo Dong 2 missile may be capable of hitting the West Coast of the United States, as well Alaska and Hawaii.
We’ve known about this missile since December, 2001. The report on it has been declassified for over a year, yet the government trots it back out now to highten the atmosphere of fear it desires to keep the public scared shitless and supportive of war.
Missile schmissle. I’ve figured I would die in a nuclear fireball since I was a child. Russian, Chinese, Korean, whatever. This just means I need to figure out a new mental ground zero since I haven’t done that for my current residence.
I mentioned this to a friend and he agreed, though he did point out that it was nice to imagine for a few years that we wouldn’t die in atomic fire. Oh well, break’s over.
In highschool I had a science teacher who had a map of our city (Salem, OR) marked with all these concentric circles of effect were a 10 megaton nuke dropped on the capital building. You could figure out where your house was and find out if you’d be instantly incinerated, killed by the shock wave or just lethally irradiated. He never said where he got it or who made it. He was a wierd guy.
In highschool I had a science teacher who had a map of our city (Salem, OR) marked with all these concentric circles of effect were a 10 megaton nuke dropped on the capital building.
That site I linked to used to have a place where you could enter your address. It would then superimpose over a map of the immediate neighborhood the effect of various blast radii. Unfortunately, that feature is no longer there.
Lame, lame, lame. I wanted to see if my house would survive a direct hit on, say, the Mann’s Chinese Theatre or, better yet, Charleston Heston’s house.
Kim and his father have murdered millions of his own people as well. Yet, there is still no talk from Washington about regime change in North Korea. G.W. Bush is a hypocrite.
Guest, killing your own citizens is heinous, I agree, but it’s NOT a reason to overthrow a government, that’s been established by the rules, the best we can do is put sanctions on them until conditions improve. If we went to war with every country that kills their own citizens we’d be at war against pretty much every country in the world (including those evil Canadians).
The war in Iraq is over Iraq ignoring the weapons sanctions put on them by the UN and the refusal of Saddam to disarm like he was ordered to. It’s about removing an unstable, and dangerous element from a region that has had thousands of years of war and strife. Trying to stabilize this region so that the few friendly nations can live in peace, and the genocide of a hundred different ethnic and religious groups can finally stop.
Well, fuck, it damn well ought to be. Do you think that if the Nazis sent twelve million people off to die, but didn’t invade Poland, we should have just left them alone?
But then, I’ve always thought that WW2 and the Civil War were both the right wars – stopping the Holocaust, freeing the slaves – for the wrong reasons – helping our European allies, preserving the union.
North Korea’s a bit of a special case, since they appear to already have nuclear weapons. Their morally bankrupt government will probably kill tens or hundreds of thousands more before collapsing under the weight of its own failed policies, but that’s still probably fewer than would die in a nuclear shooting war with Seoul right across the border. I can see how intelligent people would disagree, though. No matter what, it’s going to be ugly.
Everyone talks about Seoul. If North Korea were to nuke somebody, it would not be South Korea. It will be the 2nd largest economy in the world - Japan.
Maybe, but I think the worry with Seoul is if we do something to provoke them, like say taking out their nukes via an air strike, they will retaliate by shelling Seoul with artillery. The point is they don’t need nukes to do major damage to South Korea. Thus any strategy that removes their nuclear weapons but leaves them angry is potentially very risky.
