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Comment by onetimemanytime | Hacker News Reader

NK's Kim would be stupid to give them up, see what happened to a guy a named Saddam and to another named Muammar. Assad, if not for Russia would have the next one.

He can slow development down in return for aid...and milk them for decades.

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I don't know why you're being downvoted. Obviously everyone wants peace but realistically doing what you said is the rational thing for NK to do and there is tons of historical precedent. The only state to ever denuclearize and not regret it is South Africa.

Sweden had a nuclear weapons program in 1946-68, and probably doesn’t regret terminating it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_and_weapons_of_mass_d...

It wasn’t close to delivering actual warheads though.

But is today's South Africa the same thing as the previous South Africa which had nuclear weapons? Are the people who authorised and developed South Africa's nuclear weapons still living in that part of the world?

South Africa didn't 'denuclearise' in the sense of giving up arms.

They had a change to a completely incompetent government who wouldn't know how to spell 'nuclear' let alone fathom the scientific research and economic and political strategy required to run such a program.

And given that nuclear scientists and competent political strategists tend to be smart, they don't hang around in swamps very long.

Using downvotes as any kind of metric is usually (perhaps not always) nuts.

I can't find the article, but I read a while back a number of cases where certain heads of states denuclearized. Then the US left them high and dry when the tides turned and they were killed either by another country or by their own people who were angry about all the past oppression. Kim Jong Un is exactly in the second potential situation if he denuclearizes.

NK was without nukes for the last five decades and experienced three changes in power in that time.

If the US stops threatening to attack, and stops putting nuclear weapons in the peninsula, then he wouldn’t need nuclear weapons.

He won't get them

NK’s nuclear weapons program advanced rapidly during the Obama Administration, but I am unaware of any time that Obama threatened to attack NK.

Obama personally may not have threatened NK but the US military sure did, performing its annual exercises. Obama also did not really change the generally hostile US posture towards NK.

The US doesn't have nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. George H W Bush removed them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/10/19/u...

Sorry you’re right

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