This is an article you should read, since it shows how much closer the US is to embarking on a path to war, even if preparedness is not prophetically self-fulfilling.
The underlying issue might be ultimately regime-change, and what the US might do to accomplish it (again).
This idea of somehow denuclearizing the DPRK perhaps by force, might cheer everyone wishing to demonstrate that their prepper stashes were prudent investments, but now that some are suggesting that nuclear exchanges are still acceptable even if some analyses aren’t explicitly racist, because “peace cannot be maintained at any cost”.
Now we are in a more vulnerable position, because some people condone the horror of war, and because maintaining the peace at any cost is not identical to appeasing barbarism, particularly in the nuclear age.
The money as it’s always been, is in supplying and fighting endless limited wars, and those who would posture about total war truly have misunderstood the role of a military.
During an interview with ABC News on the last day of 2017, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen claimed that, while McMaster and Defense Secretary James Mattis had stayed Trump's hand so far, their ability to continue to restrain such a "disruptive" and "unpredictable" president was diminishing.
"We're actually closer to nuclear war with North Korea and in that region," he concluded, "than we've ever been."
The Denuclearization Fantasy
No one (outside of Pyongyang) could celebrate a nuclear-armed North Korea, but no one could reasonably be surprised by it either. Nuclear weapons have long served as a symbol of exclusivity for great powers and their regional cohorts. It's no accident that all the Security Council's permanent members are nuclear states. Having accorded such weaponry supreme prestige, who could be shocked that other countries, even relatively small and poor ones, would try to acquire them as well and refuse to be cowed by political or economic pressure.
Despite various campaigns for nuclear disarmament, the current nuclear states have not shown the slightest inclination to give them up; so the promise of a nuclear-free world rings hollow and is unlikely to persuade states that really want nukes not to build them. Beyond conferring status, these weapons make attacking a country that has them dangerous indeed, providing a de facto guarantee against regime change.
The North Koreans have made this point more than once, citing the fates of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, each of whom gave up his country's nuclear program and then was taken down by the United States. The idea that the leaders in Pyongyang can't possibly believe that they face such a threat from the United States (which already fought one war on the Korean peninsula) is preposterous. If you were Kim Jong-un, you'd probably build nuclear weapons.
The upshot: short of a war, there's no chance of denuclearization. That, in turn, means: were Trump and his generals to launch an attack on North Korea's nuclear arsenal and even a single warhead capable of striking the United States survived, Pyongyang might well use it to retaliate. According to the experts who engage in such grisly estimates, a 15-kiloton nuclear weapon (equivalent to "Little Boy," the atomic bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945) that lands somewhere in, say, Los Angeles would kill more than 100,000 people immediately and yet more thereafter. To put this in perspective, bear in mind that the estimates of the yield of the warhead North Korea tested last September run as high as 250 kilotons. And don't forget that, even if it couldn't effectively reach the United States, the North could still target either South Korea or Japan, causing a devastating loss of lives and sending shockwaves through the global economy.
And even if Kim couldn't retaliate with nuclear weapons, he could still order the thousands of artillery pieces his military has trained on the South Korean capital, Seoul, to fire. The metropolis and its satellite towns are home to nearly 25.5 million people, half of the country's total population, so the death toll would be enormous, even taking into account the limitations of the North's artillery. And given that some 28,500 American troops and nearly 137,000 American civilians are based in South Korea, many close to the border, Trump's reported remark to Lindsey Graham that, in the event of such a war, people will "die over there" is not just callous in its disregard for Korean lives, it's ignorant. Even an American commando raid into North Korea could trigger a wider war because the North Korean leadership might reasonably regard it as a prelude to a larger attack.
The bottom line? Trump could fulfill his vow never to allow North Korea to become a nuclear-armed power only by resorting to a preventive war, as Pyongyang hasn't been and is unlikely to be moved to disarm by sanctions or other forms of pain. And a preventive war would be calamitous.
www.truth-out.org/...
The RW media prefers to dither until the cray-cray takes full hold and at least justifies all that prepping.
Or in the case of David French, claim he’s being smeared rather than copping to the interpretive, objective possibilities of his argument appeasing those parties in favor of limited nuclear warfare.