It’s been that way for decades, at least, now. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan were up to their eyeballs in plots with Al Qaeda just before 9/11, and afterwards, one of them was a “trusted ally” who got all sorts of assistance, while the other got invaded and smashed flat for over 20 years. What was the difference? Pakistan had nukes.
You think Iran and North Korea didn’t notice that? Any sensible smaller government that is worried about the possibility of being invaded would be looking into the possibility of acquiring nukes. Even just a few changes everything.
I agree with you, but Putin seems to think that apartment buildings with civilians are good military targets. His cheese has slipped off his cracker. The decisions by the Russians that are being made with regard to this war are increasingly idiotic.
Did we though? ISTR that we did NOT know that the Soviets were starting to seriously fray until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Prior to that, there were some peculiar liberalizations that we saw under Gorbachev’s watch, but it wasn’t at all clear that they were fraying at the seams like they were, especially not militarily.
A nitpick: I don’t think there’s any evidence that North Korea has nuclear weapons. They have nuclear bombs, but for a bomb to be a weapon, you need to have some way to deliver it to your enemies, and I don’t think North Korea currently has that. They do have a few long-range missiles, but they’re very unreliable, and have smaller payloads than a nuke (especially the cruder and hence larger nukes they’ve made).
I generally agree with you. My only real defense for including them would be that they’ve declared themselves to have nuclear weapons. Like yourself, I’m generally skeptical about their delivery systems. On top of that, their weapons tests don’t seem to go off all that spectacularly.
On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to require much technology or luck for NK to deliver a nuclear weapon to Seoul. That wouldn’t necessarily do them a lot of good if they wanted to invade someone, even South Korea. But it would seem to assist in keeping themselves from being invaded.
Being able to package a nuclear warhead into any kind of rocket is much harder than detonating a test device on a stand, I agree with @Chronos - we don’t know if they have that capability or anything near it.
A Russia withdrawn giving up on expansion by military means, ideally attempting to reintegrate into an intertwined web of trade with gradual movement away from autocracy, still strong enough to be China’s vassal.
Not gonna happen.
What do we pretty much need as the outcome? Russia learning the hard way that expansion by military means will be ineffective and being less disruptive of stability in the future. It may include them keeping Crimea and token other territory. Getting there without allowing some face saving is not realistic. It may include China effectively owning them. Stability may come at a price.
The only quibble I have would be with the idea of delivering a nuke to Seoul. If you mean smuggle it in somehow, I don’t know how hard it would be. But if you mean short-range missile, I don’t know if North Korea has the tech for that. Miniaturizing a warhead is not easy.
Not dumb. There are huge degrees of ‘nuclear’ options even for nations without valid delivery systems. From the old ‘load bomb in a truck and drive it to your target’ to the ‘surround conventional bomb with tons of nuclear waste (medical or power derived)’. All of which have various degrees of efficacy as military weapons (not so much) or terror weapons (oh hell yes).
Well, as I said, I would generally be skeptical of their ability to build a reliable missile system to deliver a nuke. If I were generous, I could conceive of them sticking a semi trailer’s worth of equipment on top of a rocket and lobbing it somewhere in the general direction of Seoul and it getting the 40 km or so it would need to travel. Would it work when it got there? Dunno, it would be their first try at such a thing.
But even if they could do it, that wouldn’t do them much good, though. It’d just be an act of suicide.
The first nukes were dropped from airplanes… but they were also so big that the single nuke was the entire payload of the plane, and the planes needed to be specially modified to make it even possible. Are North Korea’s bombs small enough to fit into an airplane? Well, maybe. We don’t know how big they are. It might be easier if you don’t bother trying to drop it out of a plane, and just suicide-pilot it. Even easier if it’s a ship.
But then you still have the problem that South Korea isn’t just going to let any North Korean vehicle anywhere near anything important, without knowing exactly what’s in the vehicle. So to actually make the delivery, you either need to make bombs that won’t be detected by the inspectors (which North Korea definitely can’t do, and maybe even nobody in the world can), or make a vehicle so tough that it’ll withstand all attempts to shoot it down when it refuses to be inspected, or make something so fast that it can evade the attempts to shoot it down. A missile has a pretty good chance of that last one, but then we’re again asking how big their missiles are.
As Russia is reportedly running short on missiles, and is resorting to Iranian made drones to try to terrorize Ukranian citizens (and is ordering more missiles from Iran)…
I wonder if Israel might be convinced to do a covert operation to screw up Iran’s production facilities for missiles and drones? With full deniability of course.
That’s a lot to ask of a country that’s already working hard to keep actual threats to their own population and territory at bay. If “full deniability” were even remotely achievable, they would use it to blunt actual threats to themselves, not as a favor to another country.
