Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
The 2016 election campaign and the hand-wringing over “fake news,” has doubtlessly exposed more Americans to the concept of “clickbait:” links with bombastic and misleading headlines that compel a reader to click the link to read more, only to usually find a story that barely relates to, or significantly walks back, the sensational headline. Apparently, the Mainstream Media (MSM) – the world’s largest purveyors of fake news – and President-Elect Donald Trump still aren’t hip, as evidenced by today’s headline: “North Korea Nuclear Threat Trump’s First Challenge.”
It all began on New Year’s Day with North Korean despot Kim Jong-Un, doubtlessly well-lubed on his dad’s stash of rock star-quality Hennessey cognac, dangled an irresistible bit of bait before Trump by announcing that North Korea would test an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile this year – by definition an ICBM would have sufficient range to reach the continental United States.
Trump, being Trump, took to Twitter: “North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching parts of the US. It won’t happen!”
So, now speculation abounds as to what Trump and the NATO allies he’s irritated will do about North Korea and their ballistic missile and nuclear programs.
“Has our next commander-in-chief issued, 18 days before his inauguration, a pledge that the US will wage pre-emptive war against the DPRK?” asked Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution.
Obama, being Obama, has continually pushed for six-party talks that never seem to materialize. As the aforementioned AFP article points out, the only country with any leverage over North Korea is China, and China has historically been more than happy to see North Korea do whatever it wants as long as it remains in the same terminal-shithole-but-stable condition it’s been in for decades. China may not want Pyongyang to join the increasingly-less-exclusive Nuclear Club, but, as the article points out, it wouldn’t want crippling sanctions that cause the state to collapse, either.
The same article cites defense and non-proliferation experts pointing out that North Korea’s threats are nothing new and most “experts” put Pyongyang a few years away from having the missile technology capable of delivering a warhead to the continental US.
The media, being the media, focuses on the drama of Kim Jong-Un’s statements against an established backdrop of “anyone else getting nukes means the death of us all,” an accepted bit of wisdom in the West, and comprehensively wrong.
The fact is, attempting to cram the nuclear genie back into, and then recork, the bottle is pointless and impossible. The modern microwave oven will turn 50 this year; know anyone inclined to own one who doesn’t? In 1967, microwaves were enormous and heavy and expensive; today they’re only as big as they need to be, comparably light and inexpensive, because that’s how technology do.
The first atomic bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy respectively, built 71 years ago, were also massive and expensive – the biggest bomber the Army Air Corps had at the time had to be remodeled to accommodate them. Today, there are nuclear devices that fit inside a suitcase. The way gun- and implosion-type fission bombs work can be found on HowStuffWorks.com. Point being, it’s an old technology and eventually any nation state that wants it will have it before too long if they work at it hard enough.
So, let’s look at reality. Fact is, we don’t know exactly what sorts of nuclear devices the North Koreans have tested, we just know the early ones tended to fizzle but more recent ones seemingly have managed to undergo more or less total fission. If North Korea’s more “reliable” bombs are still, well, bomb-sized, then they’re still really no threat to the USA as they’d have no way of getting it here that wouldn’t be shot down over the ocean.
Gun-style nuclear devices, by design, must be large, too large to fit into most missiles. Implosion-style bombs can be made comparatively tiny, but also require a far greater amount of technical acumen to avoid becoming a very expensive “dirty bomb” by breaking apart and spewing fissile material around without it undergoing actual fission. We presently don’t know if North Korea has managed to perfect an implosion device small enough to mount on an ICBM.
Furthermore, we have been able to observe North Korea’s ballistic missile progress and, at present, their missiles mostly just threaten the ocean floor of their coastal waters. They’ve managed to get two satellites into space over the last five years, while other tests of three-stage rockets fell into the sea. Last year they claimed to have conducted a successful submarine launch of a short-range ballistic missile.
But, let’s pretend North Korea manages to scrape enough value out of its anemic economy to successfully miniaturize an implosion bomb and put it on a missile capable of reaching the west coast. So what? No, seriously, that’s the only rational response: not threatening war, not Tweeting that “It won’t happen!,” not threatening more sanctions or stocking up on potassium iodide tablets, but to simply shrug and say “so, what?”
While the Kim dynasty busily wastes 70 years worth of North Korea’s GDP chasing a bomb, the United States, which invented the cursed things to begin with, has stolen much from its productive citizens over the years and used those proceeds to amass a truly staggering nuclear arsenal while perfecting the means of delivery.
So, even if the worst fears are realized, and North Korea manages to fly some claptrap rocket over here with a warhead that yields a smaller blast than Hiroshima got and detonates it over Los Angeles; North Korea will cease to exist less than twenty minutes later. Like, totally. Poof, gone. I suspect Kim Jong-Un knows this.
So, why then is he pushing so hard for a nuclear-tipped ICBM? Simple, really, to anyone who’s bothered to watch a documentary on the hermit nation. North Korea’s entire existence as a political entity has, since July of 1953, been predicated on stoking the populace’s fear of American imperialism. A totalitarian regime as long-lived as the Kim dynasty requires a handful of things to be consistent, and one of the most important is state control over all information. This was easy to accomplish in the days of Kim Il-Sung, but less so now as the biggest threat to North Korean sovereignty comes not from the United States or South Korea, but from thumb-drives and portable DVD players full of Western entertainment being smuggled into the country that undermines the propaganda the populace is fed endlessly.
The Kim dynasty can’t stop propagandizing its people about the evils of the United States and “capitalism,” as then it would have nothing left to distract the peasantry from their misery with. Pursuing nuclear weapons akin to those wielded by the West is an essential part of that propaganda program. I’m guessing the logistics of what would happen afterward should North Korea ever shoot its eventual lone nuclear missile at the USA isn’t mentioned in the propaganda films and broadcasts.
Those in California, many of whom are staunch collectivist liberal Leftists, who are actually worried about being vaporized by a North Korean nuke can take heart: the economic theories you advocate, the ones that have so hamstrung the North Korean economy for decades, have also made it difficult for them to acquire the resources needed to build the weapon you fear. So, what do you know? Communism is actually good for something, or, well one thing: fucking up the economies of countries dumb enough to try it.
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