North Korea and Possible War

[barq2]

Question now is IF North Koren detonates a h-bomb over the pacific will and or should the United States respond with force?

Do we just accept North Korea as a nuclear country and pray that they don't use em?

I sure pray for all the people in Seoul and our 28,500 troops we have stationed there.

Just my opinion as much as I would like to have the threat eliminated now the US will have to wait until North Korea actually attacks someone and kills god knows how many before the US can respond with force. I am really conflicted and more nervous now than I ever was during the cold war. Just got a bad feeling in the gut about this. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail because I fear once a nuclear weapon is used by either side will it be able to be contained???

That's a very good question, and a big IF.

I think it probably depends where they fire their missile. If they sent it over Japan and into the sea on the other side, then things could escalate. I don't think any country would tolerate having a hostile nuclear missile fly overhead. Another factor is what boats at sea get caught up in this. If detonation at sea took out a US ship then it is hard to imagine Trump wouldn't respond. However, we've still to see if NK actually goes ahead with this. They haven't followed through on Guam (yet).

Also NK have only just become capable of making a hydrogen bomb. They've done it once. So they don't exactly have a stock of them ready to fire. It might be quite a while before they can manufacture another one to put on a missile. They've got to make the plutonium in reactors since it does not exist in nature. There's no quick way around what is a huge engineering challenge. Doing a demonstration at sea also uses up one of their precious nukes, so they won't do it until they have a spare in case of actual war.

If we apply game theory, like in the Cold War, then this is a game of chicken. To de-escalate things you need to find a way that both sides can back down without losing face. That was basically how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved. The USSR removed their nukes from Cuba, and the USA removed theirs from Turkey. For the USA, they could say those missiles in Turkey were out of date so didn't lose face. Also Khrushchev wrote a letter to JFK that was a real cry from the heart about how they might tie a knot so tight that neither side would be able to undo it. Communication was patchy, but both men knew the other didn't really want war, so it became more about how to back down.

In this case we really don't know what Kim wants. But he must understand his capital city will be vaporised if he hits US allies. While he presumably has some kind of personal bunker, while down there he'd lose control of the country with it's destroyed city. Besides which, I'm not aware of bunkers that can withstand a direct hit with a hydrogen bomb - a 15 kiloton atomic bomb, yes, but 100s of kilotons, or even megatons, no.

My hope is that some within Kim's regime see how dangerous this is and remove him by whatever means necessary. The fact he has had dissenters killed doesn't show his power, it shows his vulnerability. You don't have family members killed if you feel secure in power. But I feel very sorry for the ordinary people of North Korea.

This is really scary, but remember that unlike the Cold War the world isn't facing mutual destruction as this is far more limited in scale. In the Cold War there were thousands of nukes on each side. Not saying it isn't bad but I don't think this is as serious as the Cuban Missile Crisis which really could have been WWIII.