Stop the Bluster - North Korea is a Nuclear Weapon State

moon of alabama

The Washington Post headlined today:  Trump threatens ‘fire and fury’ in response to North Korean threats

"Okay - just another Trump bluster," I thought. No longer a reason to read such a story. But what are those "North Korean threats" he "responded" to? I hadn't seen any of those. Diving into the story I found found this:

President Trump used his harshest language yet to warn North Korea on Tuesday that it will be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” if it does not stop threatening the United States.
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It was not immediately clear what Trump was responding to.

Dear Washington Post, please fire your headline writer. Why assert that Trump responded to "threats" when there were none and when you have no fucking clue why he did what he did?

A different shabby news site claims that the reason for Trump's played up nonsense was a Washington Post piece published the day before:

The president was responding to a report in the Washington Post that, according to a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment presented late last month, the North Korean regime has “successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles.”

That report was also more bluster than anything else. The DPRK, North Korea, had said it had built such a miniaturized nuclear device in March 2016. It even published pictures of it.

On July 4th the DPRK launched its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. A second test was successfully launched on July 29 under realistic operational conditions. The DPRK successfully tested nuclear devices at least five times - including a hydrogen device with potentially megatons of explosive power. It has enough nuclear material for some 40-60 weapons. All DPRK claims about progress in its missile and nuke programs have, sooner or later, been proven as truthful. There was and is no reason to doubt its March 2016 assertion.

North Korea is for all practical purposes a nuclear weapon state with the ability to deliver nukes onto the continental United States.

All this is not new. Talk about "fire and fury" or an ultimatum to North Korea or of preemptive strikes is all nonsense. Nothing the U.S. can do to North Korea can prevent a response that would nuke and destroy Washington DC or some other U.S. city.

North Korea has good reasons to want nukes and the U.S. missed all chances to remove those reasons. It is way too late to lament about that.

Posted by b on August 9, 2017 at 02:02 PM | Permalink

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/08/stop-the-bluster-north-korea-is-a-nuclear-weapon-state.html