Pass the ashtray.

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In conversation with @RooBeeDoo1 on Twitter, she made an interesting point. With the threat of imminent nuclear war, why does anyone give a shit about smoking/drinking/salt/fat/sugar or anything else?

Nuclear war is the ultimate equality machine. It doesn’t matter what colour or creed you are when we can each fit into an ashtray as identical piles of glowing grey dust.

Currently, Donnie Trumpton and Kim Wrong-Un are indulging in a session of nuclear powered willie-waving that is escalating rapidly. Kim Wrong-Un is likely to fire the first shot. It’ll probably be over some hairstyle insult or something equally trivial. I don’t think Trump is nuts enough to fire first (Wrong-Un definitely is) but I’m sure that first shot will be followed by a hell of a lot of return shots.

It’ll be the first time in many years that North Korea will be lit up at night.

What then? Well, China and Russia won’t like having a luminous neighbour on their border. And then there’s fallout from any nuclear explosion, which can travel quite some distance on the wind.

If Kim Wrong-Un lands a nuclear bomb halfway up the west coast of America, the fallout will spread over America and probably mostly out into the Pacific. It’s unlikely to involve Canada or Mexico at all.

If Trump lands a nuclear bomb on Pyongyang – there really isn’t much else worth aiming at – the fallout is going to piss off a lot of other countries.They might not become direct allies of the Land of Kimfusion but they aren’t going to be that friendly to America either.

And picking a fight with China and/or Russia has never been a good idea. Pakistan and India aren’t far away and they have nuclear weapons too.

The big concern, as I see it, is not that Kim Wrong-un will start a war – he probably will, he’s nuts enough to think there’ll be a bit of his country left afterwards. No, the big concern is how Donnie Trumpton reacts. If his country is hit with one nuclear bomb, will he respond with ‘Call that a bomb? THIS is a bomb. So is this and this and this’.

He doesn’t need to use nuclear. Most of the people of that country would love to be taken over by capitalists. Or communists. Or even Islam. Any of those would be a vast improvement over what they have now.

I think a lot of the military would be happy to be captured. They can’t just down weapons and not fight because the bowl-haircut in charge will have their families killed. Heck, he does that to people who merely look at his style of government and say ‘Hang on a minute…’

Basically, the only real enemy in that country is Kim Wrong-Un himself. Everyone else, including most of his government, would love to see him erased. He thinks he has support and I’m sure he has a few but really he’s in charge because of layers of terror laid down by his grandfather, then by his father.

Kim Wrong-Un, in reality, nobody likes you at all. They’re all just scared and it only works because you have petty people who love to report other people and nobody can be sure who they are. They worship you because you’ll have them and their families killed if they don’t. No other reason. It’s not loyalty.

Nobody in North Korea knows who they can trust. It’s Orwell’s 1984 in action. Your brother might turn you in to save himself. So everyone has to be very, very careful. The slightest doubt in the regime can get you imprisoned or killed. People have been publicly executed for making international phone calls or watching a Hollywood movie.

Nuke them, and they might rally behind their flag. Invade and they might welcome you.

At the moment, the North Korean soldier fights because his family are at risk from his own leader if he doesn’t. The American soldier fights for flag and country. Not for the President, so don’t think they are bowing to Trump or to Obama or any other president. There is a big difference in motivation there.

Of course it’s not that simple. If America invades, China and Russia will not want an American base on their doorstep. They might resist, not to save Wrong-un but to defend their borders. Wrong-un will see it as support for his regime but they don’t care about him. They just don’t want Patriot missiles that close.

So a ground invasion might not be such a good idea either.

Trump is in a very difficult place. Nukes will piss off every country around North Korea, a ground invasion will worry Russia and China. There are only two real options.

A targeted strike to take out Kim Wrong-Un and his inner cabal, or…

Get China to deal with it. Russia won’t touch it and the North Koreans are more likely to welcome a Chinese takeover than anyone else.

So far, China doesn’t seem interested.

Which is unfortunate. With a few tanks and well-aimed missiles, they could stop World War Three before it starts.

Even so, with all this going on, why are Western governments obsessed with smoking, vaping etc?

Smoke ’em if you got ’em. You might not have to worry about any long term effects.

 

 

14 thoughts on “Pass the ashtray.”

  1. Kim Wrong-Un says exactly the same thing as the Roman emperor Caligula: “Oderint, dum metuant” (let them hate, as long as they fear), and we all know what happened to Caligula…

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  2. Donny Durko gets on his knees each night and thanks God for the gift of a friend and what a friend in Rocket man he has.
    The simple truth is that Kimmy Pocket Rocket knows that if he launches anything beyond carefully scripted rhetoric and sharply worded tweets at the US then before his retro-tech rocket makes landfall the massed ranks of the People’s Army’s Marching Band and Drum Majorettes Corps will roll over his country. China will have made that very clear to him because the thought of a Glo-in-da-dark extension in their backyard or an American occupied zone on their doorstep are not on Peking’s menu…two portions crispy irradiated duck and a packet of fortune cookies please.
    It suits Korea to dick wave, it suits China to let him and above all it suits The Donald. RHINOs are an endangered species.

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  4. There must be dozens of overfed Kim doubles travelling randomly around the county as with today’s satellite vision tech and precision missiles he would be an easy target if they knew where he was.

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  5. China has cut some trade links (They’ve cut off oil exports and won’t take NK coal) and beefed up their border with the Norks. But what the Chinese really don’t want is a few million radioactive refugees and attendant fallout turning up on their doorstep. They like their form of capitalism too much. I think they’re hoping that under economic pressure the NK Military finally decide to get rid of Kim so they can just sashay in using the old ‘humanitarian’ excuse.

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  6. Sadly I believe sanctions are working and – as usual – it’ll be those who have the least who will suffer most.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/23/north-koreans-fear-more-sanctions-as-drought-pushes-millions-towards-malnutrition

    The last time this happened (and it was essentially because of lousy weather plus the fact the poor beggars had no choice but to eat seeds stored for the next crop), hundreds of thousands perished, the young, old and infirm first.

    His father survived that, but only because the international community poured in aid – in that case it was real produce, not money, though as one might expect precious little actually got to those most in need.

    What we do know comes over in dribs and drabs. South Korea has an open door policy to any NK who makes it over. What they’ve found is the standard of education is abysmal – and they have no concept whatsoever of a free market. It takes years to assimilate them into Korean society, frequently some take very much longer, many being perfectly happy to have food and a warm place to sleep. They have zero aspirations. None at all.

    Many of these peasants can only be likened to the poor swine they found at the Nazi concentration camps. If troops do move into NK, I suspect they’ll find atrocity upon atrocity as well as a largely bovine type population who, by and large will be quite comfortable going along with the wishes of anyone who feeds them – and offers medical assistance, because that too is very severely lacking outwith the capital.

    Of course the worst case scenario is the paranoid nutter does lob a missile at Guam then, when he knows all hell will break loose, he sends a second, third and fourth at Seoul. That just so happens to be all of 35 miles from the DMZ.

    It’s that fact that’s Wee Willie’s strong point (though his missile bunkers are located quite some distance north of the DMZ and anything that’s mounted on a vehicle will be far slower and lower altitude). There is at the moment not the slightest hope in hell NK can send anything that’ll get close to the USA, and they’re decades away from hitting anything on their Western seaboard.

    Where Trump messes up is to talk about “regime”, what he needs to do is get across to the people who keep Kim in power that they’ll live. Okay there will be caveats but they will be able to keep their skin and their spawn will be left alone.

    His power base is the military, but that’s only because he has had the most horrific cull of senior people, and he’s not finished. I doubt he ever will.

    Yet what is clear is there are forces out to get Kim. He believed they intended to use his elder brother as the new figurehead – and that’s why he had him assassinated. It was the most amateur job, however the belief is it was intended as a message to those he suspects within his own power structure.

    While there’s no doubt the elder brother was approached to do exactly just that, he claimed he turned them down. So Kim’s intelligence, even on something as simple as this, is really piss poor.

    Looking at the bigger picture, there’s little doubt in my mind that within five years NK will have an effective nuclear deterrent – one that is genuinely capable of 3 to 5,000 miles – and may well have sufficient warheads to level huge areas, not using atomic, rather hydrogen technology. Way lots worse.

    As I suspected, there does seem to be some form of cooperation between NK and Iran in these fields.

    http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/14/politics/north-korea-iran-nuclear-weapons-program/index.html

    So it comes as no surprise that Iran recently (last week), announced a successful missile launch.

    (It’s what I’ve been saying in private for years, these sanctions are the best thing for self-sufficiency – and our “leaders” have been effing idiots to assume Rhodesia serves as a template for all sanctions).

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  7. I doubt Trump will nuke N Korea. There are other weapons these days, like ElectroMagnetic Pulse weapons which cook electtric circuits. Kim might wake up one morning to find that his telephone doesn’t work, and neither does his radio or his freezer or his car.

    But then, they don’t have electricity in N Korea, do they?

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