ysg, on 11 Apr 2013 - 22:54, said:

Servant of the Lord, on 11 Apr 2013 - 20:50, said:
The last thing the United States needs to do right now is to show their allies that they were just posturing, and won't honor their contracts to support their allies when bullets start whizzing by.

SK is a US ally? What makes you think that SK and US are -- in any way -- good buddies?

Really? That's it?

Basically.

Your thread is too racist and left-wing for any serious thought to be put into any reply.

What kind of person even considers abandoning an ally? Seriously?

Questioning the worth of all Koreans? Seriously?

Funny how you say that all we would lose would be a bunch of Starcraft players, as if the concept of import/export makes no sense to you. Like, they all bought Starcraft, but somehow America didn’t profit from that?

And most of us here have owned at least 1 or 2 Samsung products in our lives.

Then of course there is the strategic military positioning for America, which would gain a larger border with China should it help South Korea stomp all over North Korea.

And then there is just the frank fact that I like Koreans. North and south. I have dated both. So much for your “Koreans don’t like Americans” theory.

I put too much thought into my reply already.

L. Spiro

You know, I'd love to believe that, I really would. But you're making a lot of assumptions:
1 - NK has a reliable and accurate nuclear weapons delivery platform. Their rockets are a step above SCUDs.
2 - Their nukes are reliable to detonate when they need to. No evidence of this to date.
3 - They actively want war that could topple their regime or at least make them puppets of Beijing.

If this was a global exchange, similar to the one between US and USSR, then yes, we'd all be royally screwed. Mad Max tenfold. However, even in the worst case, Pyongyang just doesn't have the capability to do something like this.

You can't treat any nuclear threat lightly. For the same reasons a bomb threat in a building everyone is forced to evacuate, even when you believe the threat is bogus, there's been one every day, and 90% of the time terrorists explode bombs without warning.

I'll give you an example. Someone is pointing a gun at you, it's a really rusty, old piece of junk. You're not even sure it's loaded, but the man, a crazy one, is aiming at you and threatening to shot. You can risk going carelessly against this man, or you can act cautious that gun may actually fire. It doesn't have to be a Desert Eagle to kill or wound you.

2 - Their nukes are reliable to detonate when they need to. No evidence of this to date.

The atomic bomb is actually a very primitive technology. The trigger mechanism is really basic.
What's hard was to develop all the necessary scientific background to understand how it should be made (and whether it was possible and why), and the really hard part is refining Uranium; which they got that covered thanks to the left-over factories courtesy of their USSR bodies.
Little Boy was dropped 50 years without having ever been tested (Trinity was plutonium-based). Technological advances until today have greatly improved their efficiency and power though.

1 - NK has a reliable and accurate nuclear weapons delivery platform. Their rockets are a step above SCUDs.

There's a lot of ways to detonate a bomb. It is believed NK's technology is far below of what US' can protect. That is, assuming the US' anti-missile systems function as they should. External factors (such as powerful solar storms like the one from today have to be weighted in) can affect their capability. Nothing's fool proof.

You don't even need to target a city. Targetting something like the North pole, Alaska's block of ice, or Groenland could cause a damage that ranges from meaningless to catastrophic for everybody.

Not to mention that everyone going on about the lack of a threat from North Korea's nuclear program is completely overlooking the fact that all the current nuclear powers have always had nukes that were gifted to them by gods or something, and only they could possibly build more of them because they are all magical fairies or something...

Wait, that's not right at all. Nukes are relatively simple in design really, and the hardest part becomes quality control, logistics, and the base sciences. Look at the development of the US, Russian, British, French, and Chinese programs in the last century. The base sciences are already fairly well known and North Korea more than likely has access to at least 50 years of top secret developments from half a dozen nations. They have access to technology that means they can do in a year what others needed a decade to achieve.

To laugh away North Korean nuclear threats as completely harmless is to let someone stack fuel cans around your house, and then laugh at them while they struggle to get the flint set in an old zippo lighter.

And don't forget that the World economy is heavily tied to South Korea. Without South Korean shipyards the world is in a very bad state and left scrambling to rebuild a massive industrial and technical base. If you bought ANYTHING in the last month, then odds are apparently something around 50:1 or better that at some point a South Korean built ship was involved somewhere along the line. (Sure, the item itself might not have been brought on a South Korean built ship, but what about all the tools used to make it? Fuel used to drive the ship it came on? etc.)

Your thread is too racist and left-wing for any serious thought to be put into any reply.