Quote:They probably are bluffing. With their history of bluff and deception, we are left to predict what their plans might be, and the intelligent person would need to plan for the worst possible outcome. We can "hope" for the best, but we must prepare for the worst.You are about as prepared as anyone has ever been for anything. You have a nuclear arsenal that could reduce North Korea to molten slag something like three thousand times. You have submarines capable of destroying anything they put to water, and their entire land mass besides. You have history's most expensive military, which outclasses what they have by a staggering margin. You have an army almost their size waiting on the other side of the DMZ, and that's just South Korea, an ally with a tiny fraction of your total strength. You've had 50 years to work and rework your plans on exactly how you'd destroy North Korea if they ever did anything stupid enough. I don't even know how you would possibly be more prepared than you are, short of pulling out of Iraq and moving your whole military to the border.
However, it won't come to that. You know what their plans are, because you know what their options are: Don't Attack, or Die Horribly. North Korea doesn't even have the USSR's dubious advantage of "mutually assured destruction," because they don't have the firepower. For NK, it would simply be "assured destruction." You've played this game before with much tougher opponents, and it turns out everyone knows the right move: don't commit suicide. Heck, they know this game too, they've been playing it by the rules (albeit with much bluster and noise) for half a century.
Quote:I don't believe anywhere you will find an US government official telling North Korea that we will reduce their cities to ashes.Are you kidding me? If you straight up asked any major US political figure "what would the US strategic response be to a North Korean military attack on US soil", do you honesty think the answer would be anything short of "we'd bomb them back to the stone age?" And if they actually hit the US with a nuclear weapon? I mean, I'm no big fan of nuclear war or anything, but even I'd be willing to give the US a pass on massive retaliation against an *unprovoked nuclear first strike*.
As for the "ashes" quote, I presume you're talking about this, which is actually the same thing as the previous two links: a threat of retaliation if the US attacks first. They seem to be afraid of the US attacking them... You remember that time your idiot former president got up and read a speech by Canada's national embarrassment? The one where he named three countries as the "axis of evil", and then proceeded to invade one of them? Because I'm sure they still remember it in North Korea.
Quote:Not to mention that North Korea considers every action, and many inactions as acts of war. For example, during the Clinton years when the US announced it might withhold sending free fuel oil to North Korea if they didn't stop their secret nuclear program, Pyongyang announced that us not paying their nuclear black mail was an act of war.They're just blustering. In case you hadn't noticed, third world dictators tend to have bullhorns more potent than their armies. You guys lived through Nikita Freaking Khrushchev. Are you really so sensitive to the overblown rhetoric of a nation that probably hasn't even got the military might to take on South Korea in a fair fight, let alone the United States, with the whole of NATO behind them?
-Jester