So in what is being called a direct challenge to President Trump North Korea has put two ICBMs into position to be fired. I don’t think they’ve been fueled yet but in every other way they’re ready to launch. How should trump respond to the situation?
Weird. I had read that North Korea would be testing and challenging Trump soon after his election with a threat of long range missiles. But I had not read that they had actually already made the threat. So maybe I should give Trump his due here: maybe Trump rightfully called NK’s bluff by ignoring them. And since Trump did not respond to NK directly, the NK thread did not make the news. Trump did say that he would reinforce the USA’s rocket shield, so maybe that’s his response.
NK does not want to fire any missiles: NK just wants to posture a bit and say they cowered the USA into giving them another couple years of food aid.
What North Korean ICBM’s? The IC in there stands for “intercontinental”. Which other continent are you talking about, that North Korea has a missile capable of reaching?
Clearly, he should tweet insults at them. What sad, over-rated missiles Kim has!
Probably aren’t going to work though woukd be my guess.
North Korea will not go away. Making them go away would put China to the test. I think China knows better but they would certainly escalate the arms race at possibly the fastest rate the world has ever seen. This could possibly throw us all into bankruptcy. We might choose to take on China before they get too strong and world war III is suddenly on.
KN-14 with range of 8,000-12,000 kilometers could reach North America.
And even if not yet, it is certainly possible that Pyongyang could have an ICBM at some point in the Trump presidency. Bear in mind that with EMP, an ICBM would only have to detonate over North America at certain regions, as opposed to actually having to hit a specific city.
He should move to an island and shoot one at himself.
With NK as poor as it is, if Trump’s as rich as he insists he is, he should be able to buy nukes from them with his own money. Art of the deal and all that; why give NK grain just to have them come back in a year to rattle the saber again, when you can buy the saber?
While it is at least theoretically possible that they have a missile capable of reaching the USA, they have never fired one with the demonstrated range.
Then there’s guidance systems, re-entry technology, etc, which they would have to master.
So right now, they theoretically have an untested missile capable of lobbing some kind of warhead that may or may not work, in the general direction of the USA.
And then, given the size of the nuclear weapons they’ve tested to date (small, primitive) and the need to ‘miniaturize’ them to fit in a missile, it seems unlikely that they would succeed in doing anything other than launching a hot dirty mess into the sea.
If we see a NK propaganda posted depicting the USA as a vicious rabbit with long teeth, I might start to worry. 
Trump said of North Korea’s ICBMs “it won’t happen.” Since a false word never comes from his mouth, that’s all the assurance I need.
Deleted.
Even a broken clock blah blah
The North Koreans haven’t demonstrated yet that they can do more than fart in our general direction. I think you monitor the test to gain some intelligence on what they can or can’t do. Even money that it blows up on the pad.
Part of any president’s job is to protect the U.S. from foreign threats. When N. Korea becomes a threat (and it will, if allowed to), Trump needs to act accordingly. He can’t wait until Alaska, Hawaii and the West Coast are directly threatened. Kim Jong Un has already stated his goals in this respect, and needs to be taken seriously.
And if Trump is the greater threat to the United States?
What do you mean, “if”? It’s the old question, “Who will protect us from our protectors?”
I wonder if the (currently) 3 people who voted for the first option care what South Koreans think about that idea, since it would have quite an impact on them.
I can hear the drumbeat, 50 years in the future: “If Trump hadn’t saved us, we’d all be speaking North Korean”.
Whatever happened to the famous “Fear Itself” docrtrine? How much more of your constitutional liberty are you willing to give up, to keep some tinhorn (himself under constant threat of real and stated nuclear annihilation) from dumping a remotely hypothetical megaton or so in the ocean within sight of an uninhabited Aleutian island thousands of miles from the American mainland?
They haven’t had a great success rate, to be sure. I was going to go with ‘he shouldn’t do anything unless they hit something’ (hard to believe people said he shouldn’t do anything, regardless), but I think he should be a bit more proactive, possibly looking at strengthening the sanctions, missile defense in Japan and South Korea and discussions with China.
I don’t actually expect him to do anything rational, since his presidency has started off being the disaster I expected it would, but I think that’s what he SHOULD do. Hell, he’s thrown the Chinese a big bone by backing us out of the TPP deal and his idiotic talk about tariffs and trade war, but as these are self-inflicted wounds I’m sure they are good with us doing them to ourselves. Almost certainly get them a new and better trade deal with Mexico at this point.