'Artificial' earthquake detected in North Korea may be nuclear test

The US had a brigade of soldiers stationed in West Berlin whose survival time was ~72 hours in the event of hostilities with the Soviets.

We almost went to war multiple times over things like geese flying over radars. Both the US and Soviets played little games like parking ballistic missiles in Turkey and Cuba to measure the reaction.

Iran has the ability to control the Straight of Hormuz. Iraq had the ability to harass shipping traffic in the Gulf. That waterway is far more important to the US (and Japan, and to a lesser extent, China) than Paris, London and Berlin.

I would also venture that Iran, being a "non-secular" government where the more fundamentalist members see US influence as a threat to their religion and way of life, is more likely to foster radicalists that would try to enter the US with a suitcase bomb. North Korea has completely isolated itself and its people from US influence. Iran on the other hand has "porous" borders that permit western media and western culture to permeate. The permeation of western culture is seen by some as a threat to be stopped.

Edit: can the downvoter, please explain their down vote?

Well if it isn't a general principle you are defending then simply acquiring nuclear weapons is a good thing. Now if you think North Korea should have the ability to gain nuclear weapons then you certainly support any other country also getting access to nuclear weapons.

>The US opened this can of worms and created an imbalance in the world. North Korea is surrounded by nuclear enabled countries (China, Russia, South Korea, and Japan).

Hardly. Multiple states were developing nuclear weapons at the same time and the US developed them first.

>>What exactly is 'unstable' about North Korea...

A country that keeps 200,000 of its own citizens in camps doesn't exactly seem to scream stability. Now given that China is worried about a collapse of the North Korean economy and political structure your assertion is flatly ridiculous.

>>North Korea (from all credible reports) is a mess

so it is a 'mess' yet also not unstable. Countries that can't provide basic resources to their own citizens seem to be also be unstable. I wonder why that is...

>>and quite horrible for A LOT of people, THAT needs to change.

I'm not sure how getting nuclear weapons fixes that issue. In fact, North Korea spends upwards of 50% of its GDP on the military including its nuclear program.

US was expecting 0.5 to 4 MILLION casualties (just on US side) to invade japan as WW2 was nearing the end. Casualty on Japan would be many times bigger (most of them civilians).

The 200,000 deaths (mostly civilian), however regrettable, by the 2 nukes was considered a 'deal' compared to what an actual invasion of japan would've been.

The North started the Korean war, not the US.

US troops maintain a balance of power in the region, which has allowed South Korea and Japan to develop into wealthy, stable industrialised democracies.

Regardless of the longevity of the Kim family, North Korea has an unsustainable and fragile economic and political system which is widely suspected to be susceptible to imminent collapse, with unknown consequences. They have also frequently staged unprovoked fatal military attacks on Southern territory in the last few years. They were caught trying to smuggle probable nuclear components to Burma. They were caught trying to smuggle an enormous shipload of drugs into Australia.

They are not in any way equivalent to the US in terms of odious behaviour in the region.

This is not strictly true - for example in recent years there has been the sinking of the Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island.

That's irrelevant. NK gaining nukes would clearly be a negative development.

Also, did you just call Japan a nuclear power? Or are you just talking about nuclear power?

It is unstable not in the sense of "who is going to rule the country." It is unstable in the sense of they behave irrationally, have irrational beliefs and motivations. The same way that we, mostly, don't think that a paranoid schizophrenic should have unlimited access to assault rifles, any sane, knowledgeable person, would not want North Korea to have nuclear weapons. Wow, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.

Go read my other posts in this thread. If I had one wish it would be that the DPRK regime would step down so that the rest of the world would have the "opportunity" to dig the North Korean people out of the positively savage hell-hole they are living in right now. The best case scenario is that that happens and then it costs tens of billions of dollars to fix North Korea and put them on a level of, oh, say Yemen or Bangladesh, let alone South Korea. For that I'll be happy to see an increase in my taxes.

In the meantime millions of North Korean citizens are living in a stalinist police state, many of them a hair's breadth away from conditions of starvation. Oh, and their country is under the tyranny of a megalomaniac who is happy to continue the traditions of squandering his nation's few resources to build weapons to terrorize the rest of the world (to add to the long list of efforts in the same vein using everything from terrorism, such as when they downed Korean Air Flight 858, to espionage to exporting missile technology) rather than try to dig his country out of brutal, crushing poverty.

If there was a way to get rid of the North Korean regime without causing millions of civilian deaths on the Korean peninsula I'd probably be supportive of it, even if it meant an otherwise horrifying number of civilian deaths. Every year an unknown number of North Koreans are killed by the regime, perhaps as many as tens of thousands. Some estimates are that as many as 1.5 million North Koreans were killed in gulags during Kim Il Sung's reign. This is one of those rare cases where bringing up the Nazis and Hitler does not "Godwinize" the thread and is instead a fully apt and sobering point of comparison. A holocaust of North Koreans has happened, and the only reason it hasn't received the attention it deserves is because the country is very closed off and people are more concerned about what horrible thing to the world outside of North Korea the regime is likely to do next.