Would North Korea cause a nuclear global holocaust?

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I am getting concerned over the issues in North Korea. It is not that I am worried about their missiles. I am worried once the launch one, we will launch ours as well as everyone else. I heard that if they fire one it breaks M.A.D (, Mutually. Assured Destruction) policy. I am worried we area ll going to die in a needless nuclear war!

North Korea doesn't have the capacity to be a serious threat to the rest of the world because it has limited range and only a small arsenal of nukes. South Korea should be worried, maybe Japan, maybe Alaska/Hawaii. If they nuke a non-armed country then they'll be obliterated by the armed countries (I feel really sad writing that, the civilians don't remotely deserve to be nuked), if they try and attack the US then the US would respond. I highly doubt any other countries would attack each other.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Who the hell has got enough nukes who is going to be shortsighted enough to go to war over North Korea?

Even if the chubby cheeked little megalomaniac lobs one over the Pacific at the United States, you can bet that the first nuke lobbed back at Pyongyang won't be coming from the Americans--it'll come from the Chinese. Similarly, if short-round decides to send the Korean People's Army on a vacation to Seoul, you can be sure that the People's Liberation Army will be moving in to Pyongyang to keep China-South Korea trade moving.

Washington and Beijing won't come to blows over North Korea, they'll come to common terms. The Russians could care less. The English and French are out of range. The Israelis aren't going to take their aim off the Iranians, and the Indians and Pakistanis won't take their eyes off each other. Maybe Iran has a dirty bomb to throw into the mix, but that's a far cry from total global nucear holocaust.

N. Korea is a pip-squeak. It is not going to cause anything but more misery for its suffering people.

ruveyn

North Korea is a regime most concerned about self-preservation and war let alone nuclear war would be signing their own death warrant.

N Korea has no economic strategy other than extortion.

It is not as if they don't already have precedence using nuclear threat or supposed decommission to get hold of more aid.

It would be good if China could show some balls, they are at least in policy now supporting full embargo.

The relationship with China, is no longer relevant because their way of thinking has long since shifting. NK must be like an annoying nephew to China.

So there are two reasons for this, they need an excuse because to explain away the terrible conditions, and they need something to secure more aid for their cronies to squander. They are a war state, so any time they get ignored they have to try and get attention.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 20 Mar 2013, 6:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The lack of punctuation actually makes sense.

There are some many countries that are in NK capability that don't have so much trouble with other countries. NK causes the problems for itself.

I agree they do wish to seal their own fate, but they are very obsessed with the war state, that the regime is built on. That is why they haven't moved on from the 1950s.

SK has done everything, appeasement, talking, ignoring, etc. They are not interested because their state is based on being at war.

There is no point in trying to starve and isolate the enslaved people of North Korea any more, the best strategy is rapprochement. It's sad that we have crazy old basketball players engaging in diplomacy for us, I never got why people think talking to hostile countries lends them any legitimacy. Thank god we didn't feel that way with the former Soviet Union and established that "red telephone". The only hope for peace on North Korea is Kim Jong-Un.

That is why nukes are a good thing. Good thing that North Korea is not a religious country or they could be more dangerous.

The question is could they if they wanted too? They currently only have a few small nukes which are big and heavy not easy to transport and likely not very reliable. The only holocaust North Korea can cause is its own. This nuke thing is not about blowing the other guy off the planet its all about political leverage. They simply can not directly cause a global holocaust they only have a couple of nukes. The USA has plenty of nukes we sure could if we wanted to. But I have no question we do not want that.

Historically total destruction of cites has not won wars, in the American Civil War Northerners thought the war would end after another Southern city was leveled, Lincoln said the war would only end when The Army of Northern Virgina was defeated. There are lots of examples of this. Wars are won by armies.

Large degenerative wars often come out of the blue and often what would seem in hindsight really stupid.
Global holocaust can be caused by global powers like the USA, Russia and China.

Nightmare scenario: Dear Leader converts to Islam and forces every one else in NK to convert.

I dont think so. Cold war and Cuba crisis were a good sign, that even in the worst, corrupt countries, leaded by politics without any morals, when it comes to the situation of an potential atom war, some brains start to work again. The country that will start to shoot atom missiles, will be wiped out by all other countries, capable to do so. And noone has an advantage by getting wiped out, so noone wants to start that s**t. Only thing I am afraid of, are weird, mad guys acting on their own. But I simply pray that every nation, inhabiting atom weapons, dont simply store that stuff in their garage. The other thing are "dirty bombs" made of nuclear material by some fanatics.... So I see a great danger in the careless handling, that nuclear garbage material is given around the world. So a selfinvented bomb wont have the impact of any nuclear missile, but still enough to do great damage to a city and his citizens.

In the case of the civil war, most of the early Union army commanders were focused on capturing (not destroying) Richmond, but as Lincoln correctly pointed out it was the defeat of the main enemy army (the Army of Northern Virginia) that would ultimately result in victory. That said, the Union won largely by hampering the Confederate's ability to import (via the naval blockade) or produce crucial military supplies, especially food, via capture or the destruction of vast food growing areas (Sheridan in the Shenendoah Valley, Sherman's destruction of large swaths of Georgia when he marched to Savana, and then his destruction of much of South Carolina on this march to Charleston. By the end of the war, the Confederates were out of men and out of the ability to feed and equip an army even if they had the men to assemble one.

Look too at the allies bombing of German industrial centers during WW2.

So destruction of the enemy's manufacturing base can have a major impact on a war. So too is the destruction of population centers from which an army can draw manpower. Nukes are useful for these things.

North Korea is in no position to create a nuclear holocaust. It is not entirely clear to me how easily they can deploy their nuclear weapons. Even if they did, any retaliation would be limited to North Korea. I doubt any other power would retaliate with nukes.

My bigger worry are their conventional weapons. The North Koreans have over 100,000 artillery shells aimed at the South, many armed with chemical weapons. They cannot all be stopped. Then again, this has been a threat to South Korea for decades.

Worst case scenario (and this is coming from a guy known for his cynicism):

North Korea launches a nuclear attack on, say, the South or Japan.
U.S. isn't happy, considering some of our guys are stationed there.
Ahmadinejad, seeing Short Round in trouble, shouts "Allahu Akbar" and presses the big button on his chest.
China, ostensibly on our side, shows their true colors, following up their cyber attacks on the U.S. with nuclear ones.
Russia, under Putin, decides to renew old habits in the midst of the chaos, and joins the fray.
The possibility that Syria has hardcore chemical weapons doesn't help matters.
By the next decade expect everyone to have terrible fashion sense and hairstyles, wandering and pillaging about the Wastes on horseback... if there are any horses.
I'll have the rifles in the house gun cabinet ready.

My friend was playing this first-person shooter once when I came over. He said it was called Homeland. I asked, since the enemies were Asian looking, if the country that had invaded the US was China. He said no, it's North Korea. I fell on the floor laughing.

North Korea talks big, does nuclear tests, etc. because it's good propaganda. Every few years, they lob some artillery off into SK, SK hits them back, China and the US get huffy, and it quiets down. North Korea does not have the economy required to fuel a major war effort, and they don't have the nuclear power to survive a nuclear war, so they won't launch one.

Iran's more of a problem, if you ask me. You have a fanatic theocracy led by three organizations (IRGC, Supreme Leader, Government) that don't have anything approaching a clear chain of command, and their supreme leader is apparently a heroin addict, and they're apparently close to getting the bomb. Even that lunatic asylum of a government won't launch a nuke, though, since Russia, Europe, China, India, Saudi, Iraq, and what was left of Israel would come down on them like the sword of Damocles. Nobody wants a mad dog with nukes hanging around, and they know that.

Honestly, what I'm really worried about is that one of these days Pakistan and India get into it.