Would you agree on a pre-emptive strike against North Korea?

[Final-Fan]

Soundwave said:

Final-Fan said:

I agree with you that Bush's stance simultaneously told the DPRK that playing nice was not going to be as lucrative as previously expected, while aggressively pursuing nuclear capability might be a useful tool to increase their perceived and actual military defensibility now that the USA was actively invading places that it got super pissed off at. 

However, I disagree with your claim that giving economic concessions will alleviate the situation.  Any aid we give will, I believe, go straight to their military and/or party loyalists with very little trickle down effect. 

I doubt that they will agree to stop firing missiles over other countries, because—let's be honest here—if you're in North Korea and you want to test a long range missile, what else are you going to do?  This is both a source of legitimate concern for the DPRK's neighbors and a legitimate desire on the part of the DPRK. 

My personal feeling about the proposition that North Korea's nuclear capability is improving too much and/or too quickly and we have to act now to stop it is this:  as far as stopping them from being capable of nuking U.S. assets, it's already too late.  Even if their missiles couldn't get to the west coast, or even if they could but we could shoot them down, they can certainly nuke what we have in South Korea and Japan.  But who's to say that their missile capabilities will get better faster than our anti-missile capabilities?  I don't think there's such a certainty that a later conflict will be much worse than one today that we should trigger a nuclear war now when we might avoid one by waiting. 

The DPRK might fold in the face of a joint China-USA conventional weapons operation without resorting to nukes.  I don't know.  But doing anything of the kind without China's firm assent would be an invitation to World War III.  China wouldn't want to, but if NK hit them in its death throes in the wake of unilateral U.S. strikes I don't think anyone knows what would happen. 

If it's "already too late" ... then what's the point here? They have nuclear weapons. They've had them for 11 years now. Of course they were going to get better with them over time. 

IMO economic incentives can be given with preconditions that they lose some of those incentives if they don' comply they lose money. 

Any type of "lets just let them bomb Japan and South Korea" is a non-starter. Up to 50,000 Americans could be killed that's freaking seventeen 9/11s, even if you can't for whatever reason feel any compassion for other citizens.  

Also China is no hurry to help the US here, really. Why? So they can have a US puppet state armed to the teeth on their border? Gee. I think their feeling on that is "thanks, but no thanks". 

The only way the Chinese would agree to help in a serious way is if they get to keep North Korea and make it a Chinese state, and fat chance the US military signs off on that. 

This stuff isn't so black/white ... Game of Thrones isn't black/white, real geopolitics certainly is not. 

I don't understand what you mean by the question, "what's the point?" 

I'm not saying we should LET them bomb South Korea and Japan.  I'm saying I don't think we could STOP them from wiping South Korea off the map, and I wouldn't be surprised if they could do serious damage to Japan at the same time before we wiped North Korea off the map.  Even if we attacked first. 

And actually—yeah, I think the US military would rather be sitting across the fence from Chinese in North Korea instead of North Koreans in North Korea.  Why don't you think so?  Is Chinese military leadership seen as less stable than North Korean military leadership?  Or perhaps you think the United States would hate to see their good friend China get distracted and bogged down by dealing with a resentful, starving protectorate that they needed to drag into the twenty-first century.