North Korea declares war?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/13/opinion/bomb-north-korea-before-its-too-late.html?hp&_r=0

NY Times greasing the skids on the editorial page. Hmmm...where have we heard this sort of talk before?

 

It's an op-ed.

 

Yup. And how many of these were published in the NY Times in the runup to the Iraq war?

 

Without Judith Miller stories I doubt we would have gone to war with Iraq.

 

We're not going to war with North Korea. Full stop.

The NYT stenographers for whichever president's in power have bigger fish to fry.

 

Good lord, was that written by a fifth-grader?
I'm not exactly a dove on this subject, but an airstrike like what this yahoo advocates is exactly what Kim is waiting for. That'd be his green light to do whatever he wants. North Korea's missile move is a provocative act, but right now it's also what appears to be a training exercise on sovereign soil. Lots and lots of bad things happen if we're the ones to escalate it beyond that.
I'm guessing we have a lot of surveillance on that site. We'll know -- and the North Koreans probably WANT us to know -- the second it becomes more than posturing.

 

I like this part:

If Japan decided one morning it wanted nuclear weapons, they would have them by lunchtime. There are plenty of people in Japan with the know-how to build them and (as we know) they have reactors coming out the wazoo, so collecting the necessary fissionable material would be a snap as well.

 

It also would require a change to the Japanese constitution, and would likely trigger a war with China, because the Chinese aren't going to sit there and deal with an armed Japan.

 

I think you underestimate the amount of anti-nuclear sentiment outside of the Diet. Just because the Abe regime is carrying on like it never got kicked out of office and lavishing new government contracts on its industry backers doesn't mean the people of Japan have forgotten 3/11 and the Tepco shitshow that followed. Plus, there are still hibakusha among us, and writing them off as a problem to be ignored would be quite difficult in a culture with such reverence for the aged.

 

The U.S. has Japan's back on nuclear security.

Besides, if Japan had nukes by lunchtime, by 2 p.m. they'd be hungry again.