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| credit Adam Zyglis, Buffalo News BC Idonwanna sez: Him called Chief Little Finger. |
It is only a matter of time (six to eight months) before the North Korean regime is technically able to deliver a nuclear warhead to mainland USA. If a pre-emptive strike is made by the United States, it is unreasonable to expect China to simply sit by as its client state is reduced to radioactive ashes. When war broke out on the peninsula in 1950 after military incursions by the US-supplied South², China joined the conflict. Both sides will "pay dearly" if war reignites on the peninsula.
The exchange of derogatory personal remarks has made diplomacy all the more difficult. Trump was warned by his aides to refrain from such personal attacks in his speech; the vetted version did not contain ad-lib vile name-calling. As President Putin succinctly put it, "they would rather eat grass" than give up their weapons now. There may not be any grass to eat, if the Emperor continues to pander to his white supremacist base.
1.The US waged imperial war on Southeast Asia for thirteen years killing upwards of 5 million in an futile effort to exterminate a popular movement of national liberation from colonial oppression. The means were often atrociously cruel and included massacre, carpet bombing, assassination, free-fire zones, and chemical weapons. It was a monumental crucifixion of an impoverished peasantry that had little more than the will to resist their foreign overlords. They won the war, but largely lost their economic independence since they now supply a source of cheap labor and resources to the global capitalist "core". As Upton Sinclair accurately, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
2. On the morning of June 26, 1950 South Korean leaders announced that their forces had captured the North Korean town of Haeju. What they don't say is that the invasion and capture of Haeju occurred on the 25th in a surprise invasion by the South across the 38th parallel. That attack occurred two days before North Korean troops crossed the line of demarcation. ; According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in 2004 South Korea admitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that South Korean scientists had secretly been enriching uranium. In the early 1970s, fearing the effect of US reductions of forces in South Korea, the Weapons Exploitation Committee of the South Korean government made the decision to begin developing nuclear weapons. The South Korean weapons program seems to have continued until October 1979. The North Koreans may possess as many as twenty nuclear warheads, but they have no operational system with which to deliver them against the United States' mainland. Delivering them to Seoul is an entirely different matter. The North was blasted with more explosive tonnage than was dropped during the entire Pacific Theater of WWII. Pongyang, a city of a half-million then, only had two buildings standing in 1953. Gen. MacArthur testified to Congress in 1951, “The [conventional] war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20 million people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach, the last time I was there. After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children … I vomited.” Casualties in the north amounted to 2 million, including about 1 million civilians. Nuclear war will be much, much worse and the dying will go on for decades. Just ask the Japanese.