North Korea May Have Nuclear Missile Capability, U.S. Agency Says | Hacker News Reader

North Korea May Have Nuclear Missile Capability, U.S. Agency Says

nytimes.com

20 pointsantr12 comments

North Korea claims, unverifiably, that their most recent test involved a miniaturised device:

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/12/171818226/did-north-korea-test...

Do they also have WMDs?

I think a nuclear missile falls under the definition of WMD.

Edit: I assume you're implying that the US is wagging the dog here and that the threat from NK is overblown and/or this assessment is indended to create an incident.

Of course they're wagging the dog, unless NK secretly wants to be obliterated or invaded and converted to a corporatist oligarchy they'll call a "democracy".

Given NK has been testing long-trance missiles and nuclear weapons quite publicly, claiming the wagging of dogs seems a bit much.

NK doesn't want to be obliterated. It's more like very high stakes poker, where NK is hoping for a lot of aid and international permission to continue their freakish government. That hope is contingent upon an expectation that the US doesn't want another warm especially one where millions of SK civilians could be killed within minutes.

They've got a pretty strong hand.

If only the war hawks could dig up an extra trillion dollars, they could make their dreams a reality. I don't think there is public support (currently) for spending money on unnecessary wars.

EDIT: With the sequester going on in DC, I think that there is more of a feeling that we can't print extra money to fund a new, unnecessary war.

Why on Earth would they dig up an extra trillion dollars?

The war hawks and the Keynesian economists got together over a decade ago[1] and realized you can finance an entire war on debt.

The Keynesians get a massive stimulus and the war hawks get their war. Conservatives (except for libertarians) won't speak up, and democrats (except for progressive liberals) won't speak out so long as the white house has a "(D)" in residence. And lets be honest, libertarians and prog. liberals are among the most ignored demographics in Washington.

So, all in all, sounds like something Washington can get unify around to prove they can work together. War, it's a win for partisan politics!

[1] In all honesty, the realization that you could blow up the budget and call it stimulus happened longer than a decade ago, I'm just being pithy and referring to the fact that Iraq/Afghanistan were kept off of the official books for years and years and obviously completely unfunded except by debt-financed deficit spending.

What makes you think this is a recent realization? World War II was financed in large measure with war bonds, which are also just debt.

The total cost of wars since 2001 is estimated at $1.5T [1] which is printed through quantitative easing every 1.5 years as of December 2012 [2].

1 - http://costofwar.com/

2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing#QE1.2C_QE2....

edit: formatting

Cheney. We meet again.

Kinda late to realize that if it's true, no?

c'moooon. u.s. agency has no credibility at all. they said that iraq had wmd, then when you searched on google, google printed ot that there were no wmd.

http://www.salon.com/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com