[Bobboau]

India and Pakistan don't have a delivery system.

Russia, maybe but we've been on prety good relations with them lately. I doubt they'd atack us if we counter-atacked China

and I'm not advicateing any of this, just stateing what seems likely if certan events happen.

if North Korea invades the south, we will get involved, our military is spread thin so we are sort of backed into a corner, Bush is at the top.
oh no, no posability Nukes will be used

[aldo_14]

Russia and China will most likely have their ICBMs wired up to a system that automatically retaliates if a launch is detected in a hostile country (as will the US).

As an aside, North Korea will have little or no interest in actually invading the South; because the South has been exposed to the world for the last few centuries.  If the 2 were unified, the flood of stories, opinions, news etc would destroy the propaganda efforts of the Northern government; hell, even China is considered open compared to NK.

[Rictor]

edit: oops, wrong button.

[Rictor]

Originally posted by Bobboau
the point of a war with Noth Korea is that North Korea wants to be called Korea, and unfortunately we are quite fond of the people in South Korea.
aliances. ideoligy. nationalism. ego..

So is that why there are protests throughout the South calling for American withdraw? Or maybe the US is so fond of the South that Clinton very nearly started a war, without I might add the support of the South Korean government, which would have left Seoul as a smoking crater in the ground considering all the artillery that the North has directed that way.

I don't buy it that the US presence in the DMZ and South Korea is altruistic.

Originally posted by icespeed
all prospective politicians should serve a mandatory period in the frontline of whatever available war/skirmish/somewhere there's fighting there is before serving their term of office.

That statement speaks volumes, though not I imagine the way you intended it. The assumption is of course that the US is, and always will be, engaged in a war of some kind. Which is basically just proving what  some of us have been saying all along.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Rictor


So is that why there are protests throughout the South calling for American withdraw?

Because a US troop carrier ran over 2 South Korean schoolgirls.

[vyper]

Aside from that plus the rapes...

[Rictor]

The running over of the two girls may have been a rallying point, but do you honestly believe that a single incident could spark protests if the outrage and resentment wasn't there already? Try to think of this from their perspective. Would you want a bunch of bored, drunk 19 year old running around your country acting like ****ing lawless cowboys and generally wreaking havok? Look at Okinawa, and you see what's likely to happen in South Korea in a few years.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Rictor
The running over of the two girls may have been a rallying point, but do you honestly believe that a single incident could spark protests if the outrage and resentment wasn't there already? Try to think of this from their perspective.  Look at Okinawa, and you see what's likely to happen in South Korea in a few years.

I don't know - maybe?  Single events can spark general sentiment sometimes, y'know.  But that's what caused the protests, regardless of whether it was the spark or the sole reason.

Originally posted by Rictor
Would you want a bunch of bored, drunk 19 year old running around your country acting like ****ing lawless cowboys and generally wreaking havok?

Er.... you're describing the entire ned demographic, here

[Gank]

Actually aldo protests against the US presence in korea have been taking place since the 80s, long before the 2 girls were killed. The incident just brought it to western attention.

[aldo_14]

Well, I couldn't find any demographic surveys of the level of SK opposition to the Us presence, so that story was all I had to go by.

[Bobboau]

I do seem to recal something about a large pro-us demonstration there not to long ago.

[aldo_14]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2810275.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2680065.stm (see bottom)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2743215.stm

There's not anything there that actually quantatively compares the size/frequency of pro/anti-US demonstrations, however.

[icespeed]

"That statement speaks volumes, though not I imagine the way you intended it. The assumption is of course that the US is, and always will be, engaged in a war of some kind. Which is basically just proving what some of us have been saying all along."
- Rictor-

doesn't have to be the u.s.'s war. any allies' war will do as well. the main point was that a) politicians wouldn't just be thinking about the politics and what they get out of a war fought by someone else and b) the stupider ones would probably be eliminated.

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Originally posted by Maeglamor
[color=66ff00] There's nothing like telling your people that you've just leveled 12 or so of your enemy's largest cities to boost morale on your side and kill morale on the enemy's.
[/color]

pretty useless when the other side bombs your entire nation back to the stone-age...

The US loses it's 12 biggest cities in your example... China simply ceases to exist. Who 'won'?

seriously, no one is going use nukes in all likelyhood. It's just too dangerous. They are a detterence, not a practical weapon, when dealing with another country that has them too. That's why the US (and others too of course) have been looking at ways to make 'clean' nukes and small nukes...

As for North Korea: just hope that despicable regime dies out without taking the peninsula down in war.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Crazy_Ivan80


pretty useless when the other side bombs your entire nation back to the stone-age...

The US loses it's 12 biggest cities in your example... China simply ceases to exist. Who 'won'?

 

No-one;  I think the odds are that the long term damage to infrastructure, ecnomy and health would destroy the country anyways (and the neighbours... due to the fallout).

NB: apparently China has 20 ICBMs capable of hitting the US (in 2002), Pentagon estimates have predicted 75-100 in 15 years time.  Reportedly, China is upgrading its ICBMs with multiple warheads or decoys to preserve its strategic deterrent should the US anti-missile missile system actually work at some point in the distant future.

NB2: and yep, let's hope we have a peoples revolution or similar against the NK government... that situation is highly volatile with respect to outside actions, but I don't think there is any doubt it is one of the most repressive and downright evil regimes in the world.

[Tiara]

Originally posted by Crazy_Ivan80

The US loses it's 12 biggest cities in your example... China simply ceases to exist. Who 'won'?

Europe.

[Janos]

Originally posted by aldo_14


No-one;  I think the odds are that the long term damage to infrastructure, ecnomy and health would destroy the country anyways (and the neighbours... due to the fallout).

The fallout kinda depends on whether you are mainly engaging "hard" targets, such as missile silos and other underground targets, railroad network and bunkers, or "soft" targets, like most civilian targets and most of other infrastructure.

Against "hard" targets (my milijargon is propably completely way off), ground detonations are the key. This basically means that nuke(s) are blasted in he ground level, creating a huge crater and also raising up huge amounts of now-radioactive dust, which then quickly falls back into ground, causing the fallout! (how ingenious!) In case of total nuclear exchange program, enemies' nuclear silo areas would be in horrible condition. And by horrible I mean "devoid of life for several years".

Air bursts are pretty different matter, as higher altitude bursts tend to raise much smaller dustclouds, reducing the amount of matter getting their unhealthy dose of XRAY ATOMICS power. Of course, yes, if dozens of cities are nuked in one warm event, the fallout problem, at leas in general vicinity (propably spanning several dozen-several hundred kms from the cities), will be quite severe. Add that to global fallout problems, and yeah, a nice mix we have here gentlemen.

[Bobboau]

Originally posted by Tiara

Europe.

[Gank]

If the US was to completely obliterate China, a country of over a billion, the fallout would wipe out life on earth, so for all the posturing its not an option available to the US.

Aldo, I wouldnt count much on a peoples revolution in NK, call it brainwashing or whatever but nk people actually believe its government when it says the US is the cause of all its problems. If you read up on the war its not that hard to understand, many atrocities were commited by US/UN forces, not to mention an average of 110 tonnes of napalm was dropped daily on the country for three years. Seeing how technically the US is still at war with them and has troops massed at its borders as well as embargos and sanctions in place its quite easy for the north korean government to blame its problems on the US, and they're not far wrong either. I'm not saying nk are good or anything, they've done some pretty nasty things but at the end of the day there isnt a hope of its people rising up against it.

[aldo_14]

Originally posted by Gank
Aldo, I wouldnt count much on a peoples revolution in NK, call it brainwashing or whatever but nk people actually believe its government when it says the US is the cause of all its problems. If you read up on the war its not that hard to understand, many atrocities were commited by US/UN forces, not to mention an average of 110 tonnes of napalm was dropped daily on the country for three years. Seeing how technically the US is still at war with them and has troops massed at its borders as well as embargos and sanctions in place its quite easy for the north korean government to blame its problems on the US, and they're not far wrong either. I'm not saying nk are good or anything, they've done some pretty nasty things but at the end of the day there isnt a hope of its people rising up against it.

Well, there's not really any other viable options to hope for, are there?