Overtly reacting to it as a major crisis would give NK the power to create a major crisis rather easily with little cost to itself. It’s the same basic situation as adults overtly ignoring an attention-seeking tantrum while quietly limiting the child’s actions.
We tend to see international conflicts like boxing matches with quick major actions having decisive results. For high-intensity warfare like WWII, that makes sense. This is more like a very long match of BJJ; Each opponent is using what leverage he has to open up opportunities for himself to get more leverage while putting himself in a good position to limit the opponent’s actions. What looks like inaction or missed opportunities may simply be not taking the bait.
No. Missiles can be launched much, much higher than the ISS without ever reaching orbit. Reaching orbit is about how fast you’re going tangentially to the Earth, not how high or even how fast you go straight up. You have to go fast enough in a horizontal direction, not vertical. Otherwise, you’re just going to go really, really high, and then come right back down.
Think of it vaguely like shooting a basketball from the free-throw line. If you throw the ball in too high an arc, it’ll go up and come back down, short of the basket. If you throw it too high and with too much power, it’ll sail over the basket. If you throw the ball too low, it’ll go under the basket. It’s only if you shoot the basketball at a precise speed and angle that it goes into the basket.
Same for a ballistic missile. It has to go into a fairly narrow “window” in order to go into orbit - and with a certain speed, too.
In order to get into orbit, you not only have to go up, but you also have to go sideways fast enough that you don’t come back down and hit the Earth. Orbital launches go straight up at first because they have to get above the dense lower atmosphere, but as soon as they get a few kilometers up, they start to “tip over” towards a more horizontal atitude. The horizontal speed they need to get to is something like 7 km/sec, which is hella-fast. If you ever have seen video from chase planes (which they used to show (and maybe still do) for manned launches), you’ll see this.
For ICBMs, they don’t need near as much horizontal speed, because the craft is not going into orbit and will come back down fairly soon. So they tend to go much higher than orbital craft. A typical ICBM will reach an altitude of something like 1200 km, which is 3 or 4 times the altitude of the ISS and even twice the highest altitude of the Hubble Space Telescope. The NK launches aren’t even typical ICBM trajectories. They’re still testing them, so the trajectories are much shorter than is typical. But still may go higher than the ISS.
Pretty sure it’s just that the Cuban missiles were an actual threat, while none of these are. Missiles without even any bang that can’t hit the broad side of a country-sized barn just aren’t something to get too worried about, and thus not something to react very strongly about.
No, the war ended, it’s over and done with, that’s what the armistace did, as well as the soldiers not actually shooting anymore. Technically no one in the US government thinks we could legitimately restart hostilities without any additional cause, and technically no one thinks that the president could legally reopen hostilities without either an immediate threat, or Congressional authorization. Hell, technically the US was never in a war because Congress never issued anything calling itself a declaration of war.
The idea that you get to pick and choose really specific wordings to count as the start and end of the war is just silly, and bears no relations to the way people and countries with actual power act in the situation.
The Cuban crisis was a crisis because the US made it into one. The Cubans & Soviets claimed (and I think our spying confirmed) to have been surprised by our ‘over-reaction’. After all, we had many more missiles that close to Soviet territory already. (Removing them was a secret part of the agreement ending the Cuban crisis.)
The Cuban missiles weren’t an actual threat either – they had been shipped to Cuba, but not actually assembled & ready to launch at that time. So not an actual threat (yet).
Is it just me or is the only real stable equilibrium here that doesn’t result in a whole bunch of people dying to just let North Korea have nuclear weapons that could strike anywhere in the world?
If we attack North Korea, Seoul gets razed.
If we don’t attack North Korea, we have no other levers we can pull to prevent their nuclear program from becoming more advanced.
If we let them keep building, the only thing that will convince the world to strike against them is a North Korean nuclear first strike, at which point the response will be the complete annihilation of North Korea, Seoul be damned. But even the Kims aren’t that crazy, so there’s a clear incentive pathway here: they build their nukes to entrench their power, and nobody blows up.
That seems like the way this is going to play out.
Want to show a cite demonstrating these odd assertions? And I want to point out the irony of claiming that because Congress did or didn’t declare war that means…something. And that this means something to North Korea is, really, off the charts. I about fell out of my chair reading your post it’s so silly.
As to the OP, it’s not considered a major crisis because Japan and South Korea, for basically good reasons, choose not to make it so…and the US goes along for those same reasons. I have no idea what the carrot top in charge will or won’t do when/if that idiot in North Korea decides to toss one over Guam, but for now I think both South Korea and Japan are trying to keep the escalation levels at a minimum, even if that means they don’t do more than file yet another complaint and impose yet more sanctions on North Korea for the provocation. The alternative would be very ugly.
