Reply #235: Let's not lose touch with reality

[Vulture]

1.) Soldiers being in Iraq are irrelevant. North Korea can't do squat now that they could not do two days ago.
2.) His nukes are not usefully weaponized, and that can take some years.
3.) This was the excuse the international community needed to do something substantive about the nutjob, so in many ways the nuke test was constructive.


Militarily, North Korea is pretty impotent but it can still leave a regional mess. North Korea is a client state of China, so at the end of the day it is up to China to take care of this problem, not the US. If China decides that NK has outlived its usefulness, the North Korean regime's days will be numbered. The single biggest reason the US is there at all is to prevent the militarization of Japan so that China does not get nervous.

The only plausible risk North Korea poses to the US is economic, primarily because of the damage NK could cause to its neighbors in the region. South Korea have far more to lose and far more influence, and always have. Having nukes does not automatically make a country dangerous in a military sense.