North Korea vows nuclear retaliation for USA-SO.KO. military drills

[Kantor]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

This is a classic realpolitik reasoning, similar to what prevented France and UK from having Hitler killed asap. And guess what? Things just kept on going worse and at the end of WWII half Europe was given to Stalin (that actually initially planned to share it with Hitler, before Hitler's folly screwed up their plan, and was never punished for this, he eventually grabbed what he wanted with UK and USA permission instead).

So an assassination, even with its worst consequences, would just be a lesser bad. In Iran's case it would be necessary to kill the most integralist ayatollahs too, leaving alive the moderate ones, and obviously also the highest ranking pasdaran officers, so a well organized conspiracy would be necessary. But in North Korea, Kim's death would at the very least bring the limited positive effects of Stalin's death in the former USSR.

The thing is, Kim Jong-Il is completely benign and actually pretty laughable. Nobody takes anything he says seriously because under his leadership, North Korea is a poor country with failing infrastructure and an army enormous in size, but with pathetic funding. Every so often, he'll grumble about firing a nuclear missile, but he never will.

Any successors he may have can hardly be more harmless than the crazy old man who leads the country today.

And you can hardly compare him to Stalin. Stalin ruled the second most powerful nation in the world with an iron fist, and tolerated no rebellion or resistance of any kind. People feared him. More than that, people respected him. Kim Jong-Il rules a small poor country with a failing economy, and more people laugh at him than anything else. I can't imagine anyone laughing at Stalin if he said he would use nuclear missiles on the United States.