Hacker News Reader

Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

The fact that there was no major war with country possessing nuclear weapons makes me think that nuclear weapon is a very good thing to have. Imagine North Korea without nuclear weapons. They would be democratized in a blink of an eye.

View on HN

North Korea didn't have nuclear weapons for almost half a century.

There are enough conventional artillery pieces installed at the border to flatten a substantial fraction of Seoul in minutes.

More fundamental than that conventional mutually-assured-destruction deterrent, there are larger forces that matter: North Korea exists because China and the Soviet Union wanted it to continue to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_(O... The international sanctions on North Korea continue to fail because North Korea's existence is convenient.

In a limited timeframe, sure. Beyond that, I'm genuinely scared.

Murphy's law comes to mind. A small probability of badness + enough time = a near inevitable disaster.

It only takes one person to overreact for us all to start nuking each other.

I see no easy way out, apart from striving to become a multi-planetary civilization. Even then, it'll be a matter of time before the same pattern emerges.

It’s possible that the least bad though still horrific scenario is an obvious accident that instead of leading to a war results in a universal backlash against these weapons.

>They would be democratized in a blink of an eye

North Korea existed without nuclear weapons from roughly 1945 to 2006, or over 60 years, as far as I know.

Not to mention, South Korea has never had nuclear weapons, and despite being invaded by North Korea, still exists.

Well, the only reason they didn't get democratized is because they had enough artillery to turn Seoul and Incheon into a puddle. It's the same mechanism, mutually assured destruction.

South Korea didn't get democratized until 1987, to my knowledge. So I think it's unproven that the war and subsequent stalemate prevented democracy in NK in the near term.

Ah, sorry for being obtuse, I meant "democratized" as a euphemism for US invasion. You can definitely be "democratized" without becoming democratic.

Not starting the war in the first place seems like a plausible alternative to mutually assured destruction.

What you say is true, but it would be ahistorical not to remark that the genesis of North Korea was the previous "democratization" of the Korean peninsula that resulted in stomach churning war crimes, the destruction of nearly every habitable structure, and the execution of innumerable civilians. NK's "Juche" survivalist ideology is perfectly understandable given what they had to rebuild from.

I think we should not so casually make remarks that imply a military intervention would do anything to benefit the Korean people.

There's even a nuclear tie-in as Gen. MacArthur was pressing Truman to drop a necklace of "30-50" bombs in order to irradiate the land and make it impassable for 60 years.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/macarthur-really-did-...

I'm not supporting North Korea, I'm just suggesting that nuclear weapons works for them, so it must be pretty effective thing. If not for nuclear weapons, who knows how world would look today. USA and USSR would definitely fight each other, killing thousands of people in process.

I agree with you regarding holding nukes keeping them from being invaded (so called "nuclear peace"). I was referring more to the part where you said "democratized in the blink of an eye" which could be interpreted as a positive thing. Not trying to dunk on you, just that this kind of phrasing is how Americans let themselves be led into wars.

> They would be democratized in a blink of an eye.

Wait, how do you think that would happen? Why didn't it happen 20 years ago before they had nukes?

I cynically think that neither China or South Korea want to deprogram 30 million brainwashed people, or absorb the land area that has (likely) barely functional infrastructure and no resources to exploit that would cover the costs of integrating the worlds largest cult into your nation and upgrading the infrastructure alongside it. I think each side is hoping the other one has to deal with it.

I doubt either of them have the capability to do it in the first place! Invading an industrialised, heavily armed country of 30 million people which has been planning for that to happen for decades is an extremely big deal. Note that it didn't go well in the Korean War, and North Korea is much more prepared for it now than then.

Are you saying that the Korean war started when North Korea was invaded? I was not under the impression that was the historical consensus.

No, definitely not. However, during the Korean War, UN/SK forces did invade North Korea.

That seems like an odd use of the word "invade". I mean, your definition is implicit, but I'm not sure it's quite standard.

If I search the internet for, say, "soviet invasion of germany" I get almost entirely hits such as plans for invading West Germany for WWIII, or alternate histories where the Soviets invaded Germany at the beginning of WWII instead of signing a pact. Also the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

It's not entirely unheard of to refer to Soviet offensive into Germany at the end of WWII as the "invasion of Germany", but it seems to be somewhat rare and unusual. And with Bing, unlike Google, I didn't find that usage at all.

I wonder if people rarely use the phrase because it seems vaguely to imply sympathy with the Nazis.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com