It would probably make WWII seem minor in comparison. Even for the Japanese.
Uh, what? World War II saw Japan thoroughly devastated, millions of Japanese dead, numerous cities bombed and burned to waste, a broken populace, and the country having to surrender and submit to a foreign conqueror at war’s end.
I’d bet big money that a war involving North Korea wouldn’t even come near that, in terms of devastation to Japan.
Two Words–Atomic Bombs.
I think a war with NK, assuming Trump starts it, would likely involve not only Hiroshima and Nagasaki going through their second atomic bombs, but likely Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and all the other major cities in Japan experiencing the same fate. There is no chance China and Russia wouldn’t side with NK, and that would likely end up leading to a WWIII scenario. The Chinese and Russians aren’t just going to sit around and let us do NK the way we did Iraq and Afghanistan. That just won’t happpen.
Why would Russia and China really care about North Korea? Just because they are communist? Or because they are close by? North Korea is a total basket case economy that adds nothing to the world . They would wipe out Japan to make up for North Korea?
I highly doubt NK would have the nukes to make all of the above-mentioned happen. They have to hit a lot of cities in South Korea, Japan, and the USA simultaneously for it to be worth (since they’ll be nuked in return, might as well go all-out.) They might have just 25 nukes to be divvied up among 50 targets, and that’s not counting malfunctions or intercepts.
China cares because they don’t want a war in their borders.
China and Russia wouldn’t nuke Japan in a war. North Korea would very likely nuke Japan in a war.
In order to nuke Japan though, wouldn’t they be using more conventional short range missiles which can be brought down by Patriot-type systems?
It’s hard to know what would happen in the initial hours and days of war. If we’re fortunate, maybe the North Korean military overtakes Kim and ends the war before it ever gets started in earnest and opens the door for negotiations. After all, nobody wants a long messy war and the Kim regime would be done. I have no idea how likely that outcome would be - not very I’m guessing. On the other end of the spectrum, if we’re very unlucky, Kim has a loyal military that rides out the storm in underground bunkers with him and he destroys large swaths of Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya. Bear in mind the longer the war goes on without an end, China and Russia will have something to say about how long the United States continues dropping ordnance, conventional or otherwise. I suspect the reality is somewhere in the middle. America’s allies and perhaps the United States itself will prevail, but not before paying a heavy price. China and Russia would have more regional influence; the United States, Japan, and Korea, less.
A nuclear war on their borders would obviously be disastrous for China, and it would be disastrous even without nukes. Remember the history of the Korea conflict as well: China pushed the Americans back out of what is now North Korea because they didn’t want Americans on their border, and they still don’t. Russia and China both share a desire to weaken the United States and to control its influence in the region. Having the United States brutalize a former ally and client state to the south of their borders would rattle both countries.
China has tried to straddle itself on the fence of its own desire to keep the US power limited in the region while simultaneously maintaining its relationship with the US as an economic partner. It fears the current shift by the US toward nationalism because it means that it may have to find new partners to keep its economic growth and political influence growing. China is hoping to be influential enough to find a diplomatic solution, but I suspect there are those in the White House and Pentagon (Bannonists and just old hardline nationalists) who don’t want diplomacy at all. They see a war with North Korea not only as a way to remove a threat but also to injure China as well. China’s aware of this. The question is what to do about it.
I suspect China will deepen its ties to Russia, draw itself closer to Putin not so much as an ideological partner as they were under Mao, but more so as a strategic partner with the shared interests of controlling the United States. Putin will be more than happy to oblige them, and Trump will find out that is bromance with Putin is strictly for Putin’s and Russia’s gain, and not ours, though he’s happy to support Trump in providing America more self-inflicted wounds.
Forcing Koreans to be enslaved is a stain on China’s honor that should never go unmentioned. Not that they had much honor to begin with.
It’s a big leap to assume NK has the technology to hit even close by Japan with a nuke missile. Yes they have run tests but that’s not the real world and nobody knows about their accuracy. They could try to hit Japan and be way off .
Or, they could try to miss Japan and hit it!
Especially if they fire them in multiples. I highly doubt they would fire them one at a time.
Going off on a tangent, I read somewhere (I think it was one of the wonks at the Non Proliferation Studies) that North Korea right now is more concerned with its growing season and harvest. According to the person interviewed, he said that the missile tests and weapons testing are likely done until spring. It also crossed my mind as I read that, that if US were to make a move, this might be about the time to do it - purely my uninformed conjuncture and the expert wasn’t interviewed on that subject. The focus was more probably leaning on the assumption that there is still a diplomatic end game, probably one that recognizes North Korea as a nuclear power but that North Korea might be open to reducing tensions in the future (fewer missile tests, etc). This is really getting to be nebulous, and that’s the biggest danger of all. It’s easy for one side or the other to misread, misinterpret a signal.
A nuclear missile has never been fired with a warhead that exploded has it? They test the warheads and the missiles but not together. The test missiles don’t have live warheads on them, I assume.
You’re presumably correct on this, and the question now is, whenever they do decide to restart testing, will they take the next most provocative move and blast one over the Pacific? I kinda think that would be crossing a big, fat red line for the Pentagon if they did, but then again, what would the appropriate response be, knowing what kind of power they might possess? No easy decisions there, I’m afraid.
On another tangent, a part of me wonders if the US tries a strategy aimed not at provoking North Korea but perhaps one that might convince China to do something to take out Kim’s regime on their own. If the US can convince China that an American attack is imminent, perhaps they decide it’s best if they beat us to the punch. It would be extremely risky for China, but they would have the ground troops to overrun North Korea. No idea how realistic that scenario is, but it crossed my mind.
It can’t.
they could try a dirty bomb which is not a nuke explosion. It’s a regular explosion that scatters radioactive material around.
It has been done once:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/weapons/ballistic/nuclear_test.html
It didn’t go well. The missile’s course pointed toward Hawaii for a brief time. Before anyone could do anything (if anything could have been done) the missile corrected it’s course and proceeded to the target. But it scared enough people that no other live missile tests were conducted. And then the nuclear test ban treaty came into force and it was no longer possible.
I concluded that there won’t be a war with N. K. as soon as I read that DoD publicly stated that they could not promise to eliminate all the N. K. nukes without boots on the ground. I can’t imagine Trump being willing to sully his reputation by getting America tied up in a ground war. Americans would get hurt and his popularity might suffer. Not a chance he is willing to take. Some nice sterile bombing, that I can well believe in. But not boots on the ground. Too risky. Trump bluffs and blusters a lot-remember in the campaign he was going to give “his” Generals 30 days to come up with a winning strategy in Syria, then he was going to go in and clean up the mess in a few months. And Afghanistan was a disaster-he would fix that as well. Of course we know what happened. The US kept the Obama strategy and it eventually worked as well as expected. Trump had to be pushed into approving a few more thousand troops for Afghanistan to keep the stalemate going.
And we have seen how N. K. handles the various threats to them. They bluster and brag, but are careful never to do anything that would provoke a response.
So, no war.