I’m convinced that the ils really are/were batshit crazy. Here’s all I need to know, and if it’s a little bit of a simplistic argument, well then fuck all y’all (in the nicest possible way, of course):
North Korea has maybe six nuclear power plants. It’s geographically about the size of Mississippi, but with ten times the population.
Are you talking here about that incident back in 1976? When the two American officers were murdered?
I was in South Korea when that happened, serving in the Army as a Korean linguist. Let me tell you, we were shut down on base so fast and buttoned up you wouldn’t believe it. Worked long shifts too, for preparedness. During that period I made a MARS call home, and before the radio operator put me through I was told that if anyone asked what was going on, I was just to say that everything’s fine.
That’s when you start to get nervous. We came that close to war I think.
Yep, that’s what I’m talking about. There’s a pretty good link on the murders and Operation Paul Bunyan to remove the tree afterwards here. It definitely could’ve gotten very dicey if there had been resistance. I’m damn glad the balloon didn’t go up on you.
there won’t be nukes, just a lot of paranoid posturing.
Dictators have a remarkable liking for self preservation. He knows his whole country will be flattened if he tries to nukle anyone, and more importantly, a nuked country won’t be able to adore him like they used to.
Actually, it was just one young girl, IIRC. The others (about 20 in all) were adults of varying ages. Five of them were returned this past year (plus the daughter of the young girl, who is reported to have died over there a few years ago).
One interesting case is Hitomi Soga, who was abducted in her early twenties about twenty years ago and was allowed to come back last year. She got married while in NK to an American, Charles Jenkins, who deserted from the US military in 1965 while stationed in S. Korea. She says she wants to go back to her husband, but the Japanese government has refused to allow any of the returnees back to NK. Her husband, meanwhile, can’t leave NK, as the US has announced they will start extridition proceedings as soon as he arrives in Japan to try him for desertion.
What piques my curiosity, though, is seeing one news report about PM Koizumi insisting that returning the abductees be made the top issue of the upcoming summit, right next to another news story about the Japanese Supreme Court rejecting compensation claims by Koreans who were abducted by Japan to work as slave labor during WWII. I’m waiting for one of the papers to notice the irony, but so far none of them have.
