reply to post by SkepticPerhaps
Oh, he's nothing to underestimate. He's got a 2-million+ strong army ready to invade South Korea.
It's an elegant plan in its simplicity. Korea is small enough, and the terrain difficult enough that the most effective invasion strategy would be
to simply storm the DMZ. They've got some tunnels dug to get under that 3-million landmine restraining order they have against them.
I wouldn't want to be a soldier holding the lines in South Korea.
That said - their biggest threat comes from a few scenarios:
First - a nuclear weapon delivered to the port of Pusan and used to deny the west their primary landing strategy to defend South Korea from invasion.
Likely delivery methods would include a submarine or missile.
Second - A nuclear weapon delivered to a city in Japan. The Koreans have some bad history with the Japanese.
Third - A nuclear weapon delivered to South Korea. Completely improbable, as North Korea doesn't want to destroy South Korea so much as they want to
liberate their country from the 'evils of imperialist America.'
Fourth - A nuclear weapon sold to a terrorist organization. Also highly improbable as it would be akin to castration.
They are not a threat with regards to nuclear war. His nuclear arsenal could not even destroy his own country, much less make a mark on the world.
His weapons are also somewhat on the 'clean' side of nuclear weapons - relatively little fallout compared to our first and second generation
warheads.
Korea gets subjected to more radioactive fallout from China's smog (in the form of this 'beautiful' yellow fog) than it would from Kimmy unleashing
his nuclear arsenal. Yes - there are radioactive isotopes released from the burning of coal.
And the entire conventional arsenal of a developed nation, such as the U.S. or Russia - would displace more land-mass and release more energy than all
of Kimmy's arsenal.
There is a difference between the prospect of war with Korea - and the concept in this thread - which is that Korea will instigate a world-destroying
nuclear exchange.
If we were going to blow ourselves up with nuclear weapons - we would have done it long ago, when the stakes were much greater than a little nuisance
of a dictator with a few tactical nukes under his thumb.
And it astounds me, even more, that we would be looking to aliens to solve our problems. Assuming they are benevolent and wish to help us - they may
save us from our own stupidity.... but what kind of help would they be if they were always showing up to fix our problems? What would we learn?
I think that if we are being observed by an interstellar community - joining it would require that we are capable of carrying our own baggage.