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Comment by newaccount2021 | Hacker News Reader

newaccount2021

what can NATO + Japan do? Sanctions don't work, scorn doesn't work, diplomacy doesn't work, and China isn't going to allow a military response

basically NATO + Japan can pound sand and little else

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It's unclear that NATO + Japan need to do anything. What is North Korea going to do, hit Tokyo? That would be the surest way to get Pyongyang "liberated" ASAP ...

Let’s say they don’t attack with nukes but just shoot small conventional warheads every now on then, like Israel and Gaza. It’s not enough justification to go for an all out war, being that NK have nukes.

Israel and Gaza et al is a civil war, an internal matter much different from sovereign nations from different global treaties attacking each other.

Not a civil war at all. Gazans aren't citizens of Israel, they have their own elections and government. But if you insist, you can switch "Gaza" to "Lebanon" which fires missiles at Israel every now and then as a nuisance (just did a few weeks ago).

It's a struggle for sovereignty over disputed land which has largely been under both sides at one point or another in recent history. "What about <pedantry>" doesn't need to apply here. The definitions and situation is fuzzy. The point is that it is a vastly different situation than China-supported DPRK firing missiles at Japanese population centers.

Seoul is like 35mi from NK borders, or like 1.5 tiles in Civilization hexmap. It’s actually too far for IRL howitzers to set up and bombard the city but not comfortably. So it’s not a good idea to set them off when retaliation is expected.

With rocket assisted projectiles (RAP), North Korea's Koksan self propelled guns have a demonstrated range of 37 miles. Note that this is based on the performance of the guns observed during the Iran-Iraq war, and it is entirely possible that further improvements to range have been made in the past 30 years.

Also, it's 35 miles from the DMZ to the center of Seoul, but Seoul is a big city. There are parts of Seoul proper less than 25 miles from the DMZ, and the metropolitan area extends much closer still. Hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea live within comfortable artillery range of North Korea.

The thing is, North Korea is right next to South Korea, so they don't need fancy missile to stir up trouble. Simple artillery is enough, as they actually did in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Yeonpyeong

And, contrary to some popular theories, actually attacking your neighbor is not that useful for bargaining. All it does is to make other countries very angry and call for more hardline policies. So the best NK can do is keep its madman shtick, not actually use the missiles, and demand larger concessions. But other countries would want, in turn, some semblance of promise that NK will stop being so crazy if it gets economic aid. So we're back to stalemate.

Gaza gets invaded now and then. I'm pretty confident that when the first conventional warheads land in Tokyo, it will be all out war.

Yes, it's funny how there is a lot of fear about a country that attacked noone since the Korea War (and that didn't commit massacres during it unlike their opponent), especially when those people are from a country that have a carte blanche to attack other countries and do it on a regular basis.

NK rulers aren't idiots, they have access to the West (media and travel) and they know about the relative military strength and probably aren't to keen to have Democracy™ being forcefully implemented on them.

Give the N Korean leadership some assurance that the next president isn't going to do a u turn on a peace deal. N Korea just wants to survive. And America is an unreliable partner in peace.

That's the point that is never spoken about in complaints about NK's "belligerence". And that's how every country that did away with an WMD program that wasn't in the pocket of the West eventually became the target of Western aggression. Libya, Syria, Iraq all had some sort of nuclear weapons programs. And all were eventually attacked by the West because nuclear backed sovereignty is the only sovereignty respected by the West.

Oh, is it different elsewhere? Pray tell, where is sovereignty respected in its own right?

That is completely besides the point. It's a historical fact that countries with enimity to the west were much more willing to give up WMD programs before the downfall of those that did than nowadays.

I'm not sure what the point of this question is. I stated that "nuclear sovereignty is the only sovereignty respected by the West" and then you ask "where is sovereignty respected in its own right". I'm not sure how that follows.

> what can NATO + Japan do?

There is a solution to North Korea as it stands today. Chaos will take care of the regime eventually. Chaos is undefeated when it comes to wiping out totalitarian systems (quick, name a couple dozen 100-300 year old totalitarian regimes that are thriving today). That system won't stand forever. Plan as best as possible for what to do whenever the Kim dynasty finally implodes, whenever it inevitably gets toppled from within.

The primary concern is a Myanmar style military junta, backed by China, taking over. Then you're more or less just back to square one. Unfortunately that's by far the most likely scenario. China has zero interest in seeing a unified Korea, in the model of South Korea, on its border - they will not allow it, and they have the capability to easily prevent it.

> (quick, name a couple dozen 100-300 year old totalitarian regimes that are thriving today)

That seems an unfair bar to set. There aren't dozens of liberal democracies with that long a history, either.

The flagship oldest democracies (Athens, Revolutionary France) didn't last any longer than that. Arguably the USA is doing the best at 250-ish years.

I don't dispute that NK's juche seems less likely to be stable in the long term than, say, Switzerland, but this seems the wrong way to go about the argument.

Well, I would not call US before 13th amendment a democracy and that was 150 years ago. But to your point, liberal democracies are a new phenomenon.

The US couldn't even be called a democracy until the end of Jim Crow.

War. War is the only thing that could still work. Of course, advocating for war, even against a country as dangerous as North Korea, is a huge taboo in our public discourse. But it is the only solution left to the North Korean problem.

This "solution" means Tokyo and/or Seoul gets nuked. That's hardly a solution.

Or even if it happens before NK is a credible nuclear threat, Seoul is in range of thousands of heavy artillery emplacements that'll get at least one shot off. There's not really a counter to artillery shells like you can use for rockets like the iron dome, so Seoul would be pretty much guaranteed to be leveled, with countless dead.

Since WWII, US never fought a war with the stated goal of winning at all costs. Modern wars are limited scale conflicts designed to have soft outcomes (e.g regime changes) rather than hard outcomes (annihilation of your adversary).

>"War. War is the only thing that could still work."

Yeah, let web developers decide our future.

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