Comment on How come nobody does anything about North Korea?
SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Nukes. We know they have them and missiles to deliver them. Any situation where a wildcard like North Korea uses nukes in any offensive capacity is terrifying. “Nuclear War: A Scenario” is a great modern book on how things could go to hell if one single North Korean nuclear missile is launched towards the United States.
Artillery. In any case of open war on North Korea anyone within artillery range of the NK border will be bombarded with heavy shelling. Even if it lasted for just an hour or two before the batteries were eliminated the civilian casualties and destruction would be like a large natural disaster. Now imagine if chemical shells were added to the mix, because they have those too.
China has the most leverage to help North Korea on a humanitarian and diplomatic level, so if it could be done the best chance is through them.
Carrolade@lemmy.world 1 day ago
To add to this, N Korea also has a huge conventional army, and is a very mountainous country. Lots of soldiers+mountains=very bloody to invade.
This is also why Iran is fairly safe from ground invasion. It’s like a gigantic Switzerland, which if you’re familiar with WW2 history, even Hitler left Switzerland alone despite kinda wanting to occupy the place. The cost was just too high compared to the benefits, so, y’know, may as well skip it and invade the USSR instead.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Despite what people keep saying, a war in NK would be short and one sided. While they could cause a lot of destruction at the start, after a few salvos their artillery would be taken out by air power. Then their entire command and control structure would be eliminated so they couldn’t communicate with their troops at all. And those troops are conditioned to not do anything without orders. So at best they’d be sitting ducks waiting to be taken out. And I’m pretty sure most of them would cost to surrender once it’s clear that the regime is gone. There’d be a share of diehards that would choose death over surrender but i don’t think that would be a large percentage.
Carrolade@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Modern war planners mostly know better than to count on everything going well.
phdepressed@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Yes, that’s basically what we did in Iraq. It led to a 20y occupation, thousands of troops killed, hundreds of thousands to millions of civilian deaths, and several new terrorist organizations. It will cost the US alone about 8,000,000,000,000. Basically the entirety of cultural progress and then some was lost in a few months.
www.brown.edu/news/2021-09-01/costsofwar
rumimevlevi@lemmings.world 1 day ago
We saw how that failed in iran