Comment by erxam
6 days ago
Indeed. The DPRK was right from the start. They always were.
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
6 days ago
Indeed. The DPRK was right from the start. They always were.
For the longest time I thought they'd gone too far, but now we're the clowns putting on a show.
Sure, but there must always be a fear that the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty. And may tolerate a coupe instead. Which then reduces the madness and the deterrent effect. The extra step the Dprk have taken is to try and build bunkers so that the regime could survive the destruction of the country. A step further into madness that goes beyond what western countries have been willing to accept.
The US built a lot of bunkers like this back in the 1950's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Weather_Emergency_Operat...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock_Mountain_Complex
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Greek_Island
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheyenne_Mountain_Complex
With the rise of solid fuel ICBM and then MIRV leading to the truly massive number of warheads pointed at the US, the US switched to airplanes for the most important continuity of government issues, figuring that the skies 30,000 above the US will largely be secure (presuming the plane is appropriately EMP shielded) due to the many US geographic advantages, and so it is the best place to ride out the initial attack and then take stock, get to somewhere safe, and figure out what to do from there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Looking_Glass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TACAMO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_E-6_Mercury
But the North Koreans can have no illusion that the skies above their country will be safe: there are several major enemy airbases a few minutes from their border, their entire airspace is routinely surveilled and powers hostile to them have made large investments in stealthy air superiority fighters, so the air is not a safe place for the DPRK continuity of government plans. The DPRK does have trains but I would not consider those safe in the event of a major war, since rails are difficult to keep secret.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taeyangho_armoured_train
So bunkers are the best they can do, given their circumstances.
Where will the planes land?
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Watching a civilized nation drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy really got into peoples heads.
What's worse is.. it worked.
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> And may tolerate a coupe instead
The US is vulnerable to that scenario as well, even though the military’s willingness to comply with literally textbook illegal orders is not encouraging.
Aren't there bunkers near dc for that reason though?
According to some deep dives into the budget figures for the East Wing Ballroom .. there are new bunkers going in as we type .. and likely being networked underground.
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Not to mention the bunkers being built by various Silicon Valley billionaires, who by rights should be considered appendages of the U.S. state.
“And may tolerate a coupe instead.”
I could tolerate a coupe but I’d prefer a sports car :-/
> the military and public would not want to die in a nuclear inferno to defend national sovereignty
Erm, it's kind of demanded for people to go out and die to defend national sovereignty in nations that have a draft. For myself, I'd prefer to be vaporized than bleed out in a trench if it really comes down to it.
Realistically speaking you'll die of an infected and untreated burn wound though, the severe blast and burn area is just much much bigger than the fancy "everything just goes poof" core.
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Vaporized is good with me. Not so keen to have my body melt over several days due to acute radiation exposure though...
Giving up is really very common in war.
coup
Note that MAD only works when there are a small number of players. Once it gets up past around 12, a.) it becomes too easy to detonate a nuclear weapon and then blame somebody else to take the fall and b.) the chance of somebody doing something crazy and irrational becomes high. Same reason that oligopolies can have steady profit but once you have ~10-12 market players you enter perfect competition and inevitably get a price war.
There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
>There are 9 nuclear-armed states today. Likely this has set us on a path where nuclear war is inevitable.
It's really hard to guess how retaliation would happen in practice, a large-scale nuclear war certainly isn't inevitable.
The most likely targets for nuclear strikes right now are also non-nuclear states.
People massively simplify the dynamics of launching a nuke. If Russia launched a nuke on a Ukrainian military target away from civilians there is virtually 0 chance of nuclear retaliation. Ukraine doesn't have them. Does anyone think the US, France, etc. would nuke Russia? Of course not.
It's scary, but in some scenarios one nation can absolutely nuke another nation without threat of getting nuked themselves. In reality, the cat coming out of the bag looks more like that than nuclear armageddon.
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Yeah I imagine we’ll see a cottage industry of small countries with nukes in ten-fifteen years.
Plenty of places have uranium and unless they are being watched like Iran they can just set up clandestine enrichment operations.
I think have thousands of artillery shells aimed at Seoul is the larger deterrent.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.
I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.
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The importance of this is often exaggerated. It's significant, but it's not that significant. RAND Corporation modeled this, https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html
It assumes ~130,000 casualties from a worst-case surprise attack on population centers by the North.
If a conflict started ramping up, evacuations would rapidly shrink this.
A significant deterrent, sure. But it rapidly becomes less and less meaningful as the DPRK builds its nuclear arsenal.
They're safe, but at what cost?
They drive old cars, have slow internet and can't visit the coliseum. They're not invited to the cool parties.
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NK is protected by China, a very credible force.
Maduro was protected by both China and Russia.
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What's Trump's kill count at, just to move media focus away from the Trump-Epstein files.
Nowhere near Maduro's by any reasonable threshold or metric. Not even the most hardcore TDS in-patients claim otherwise.
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Well, really any leader who dissatisfies the president of the US, really