It was a cold and rainy night in Korea *cue the scary music*

Oh....never mind.

I'm constantly reading and watching the news, and being the current events junkie that I am, this North Korean nuclear crisis thing has become my Super Bowl.  I find it fascinating.  I've also observed this is a good time to be a retired General as they now have a steady paycheck playing armchair...uh...Generals on TV.  But I've played Battleship, and seen Patton three times as well as Kelly's Hero's twice, so I know a bit about military strategy myself.  Therefore here's my prognostication on who will be the last man standing:

First of all, there will be NO smoking holes in Korea, North or South, or anywhere else.  No nukes will be expended in the making of this crisis.  Behind-the-scenes diplomats will find a way to keep violence to a relative minimum.

Did anyone hear the report of the Chinese telling North Korea's Kim Jong Dung that they would have his back if he was attacked, but if he attacks pre-empitively, he's on his own?  This is a big deal!  I suspect the Chinese are actually rather scared of Kim themselves.  The Chinese liked the N Koreans poking the West as it took unwanted attention away from their indiscretions, but now they're realizing the unruly child they enabled has become a nasty juvenile delinquent. 

Meanwhile, the only advisers Pres Trump seems to pay attention to, General's McMaster, Mattis, Kelly, and perhaps Sec State Tillerson, will be calming the President down behind the curtain and looking for a way for the Prez to save face, without telling him what they're doing, of course.  It's all about stroking his ego.

The mid-August deadline for Kim Jong Dong to fire off his missiles will come and go.  The planned US/South Korean military exercises will go on as planned.  Kim might launch a test missile into the Sea Of Japan, no where near Guam.  Kim will go on local TV and strut his stuff, claiming he has backed down the Great Capitalist Satan.  

We'll fly B-1's and B-2's back and forth south of the DMZ during our joint exercise with S Korea, shoot Kim the "Trump bird", and the President will claim on the Fake News Channels his tough talk saved the day.  

The Short Fat One and the Tall Orange One will both enjoy plenty of fist bumps and back slaps at home, and things will return to the back burner where they've been for two decades.

Which will still leave Kim Jong Poop with nuclear weapons.  We want him to give them up, and he'll steadfastly refuse.  To Kim they're his security blanket.  With those in his back pocket he knows the rest of the world won't take him out.

Our only hope will be for one of his own Generals to whack him, which we'll soon find will actually solve nothing.  The N Korean's have no knowledge/history of how "democracy" works, so all we'll be doing is replacing one dictator with another.  And then the new guy...let's call him Dung Slung Shit...will want nukes in his back pocket.  *sigh*

Just as we'd rather there not be a nuclear China or India or anyone besides us for that matter, fact is that Genie is out of the bottle.  Trump can't put it back any more than Obama or Bush or Clinton before him could.  We'll just have to hope that we all understand the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction and sheath our nukes.

OK, so there's my latest prognostication.  Maybe one of these days I'll get one right.

S

Old men and their games

Ho Ho Ho....Merry Christmas.  Let's take a second to listen in to Prez-elect Donald Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin exchange Christmas Good-Will-To-All wishes.  It went something like this:

Putin:  "We have bigger, better nukes than you do."

Trump:  "Only until January 20th, Pootie.  Then I'll call your SS-18 and raise you a ballistic missile submarine!"

So let the games begin.  

This war of words is almost comical.  Despite our crushing national debt, the US could still, if it wanted to, spend $$Billions to expand our nuclear arsenal.  But we won't because we don't need to.  The Rooskies simply don't have the financial resources to engage with us in an arms race.  They have trouble just meeting their weekly payroll!

And besides, nuclear weapons have lost much of their "fear factor".  Here's the deal....nukes aren't the "deterrent" they once were.  For a country to be taken seriously when they rattle their nuclear sword they must have two things:  1, lots of nukes (which both of us have); and 2, THE WILL TO USE THEM (which neither of us has).

In 1946 we alone had nukes and we'd just shown the world we weren't afraid to use them.  "Back off or you're next!"  A couple dozen years later both the US and the USSR had more than enough nukes to wipe each other out, and we settled into the world of MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction.  Both sides understood that if they unleashed their nuclear arsenal, they would themselves be a smoking hole in about 30 minutes, so neither side dared try it.

By 2016 we have become so "risk averse" that as often as not our FA-18's flying over bad guy territory return with all their weapons still on their wings.  We're afraid of "collateral damage" if we miss and take out so much as a popsicle stand.  There's no way in hell we're going to send a nuke into Tehran or Pyongyang or even Moscow or Beijing, nor will they hit NYC or Washington or London.  World opinion would universally yell at us and make us cry!

More than likely we'll settle back into the old Cold War practice of combat-by-proxy, such as we're seeing now in Syria, and/or most menacing of all, cyber-warfare.  We should be more frightened of our electricity or our ATM's going down than we should be of a nuclear mushroom cloud over Topeka.

So relax, lets just sit back with a box of popcorn and watch Trump and Putin play "mine's bigger than yours."  *snicker*  Life goes on.  :)

S