Kim lets anther one off.

[Suff]

Test and repeat seems to be working for the nuclear testing too. As NK tests a warhead with up to 20 times the power of the last most powerful test.

A 2 stage weapon has now been proven, making them a serious threat. It's now no longer possible to ignore them at these threat levels. I wonder if KJ Nutter has worked that out yet?

[AliasAggers]

It certainly looks a serious matter now.

Personally, I have a horrible feeling that WW3 is not that far away .

Even if a conflict is not World Wide, the possible effects on the whole planet are cause for concern.

But, what is the answer? How could this threat be safely removed?

Any suggestions?

[Workingman]

Not me, Aggers.

I have read all sorts of proposals in the last few days, from a surgical strike (probably nuclear) to full on diplomacy including a reduction in trade sanctions in return for x, y and z. Every single one ran into a dead end for some reason or another.

It looks as though both sides are so entrenched that there is no escape other than war on the Korean peninsula.

[Suff]

Perhaps we are going about this the wrong way.

How about full proliferation with sanctioned retaliation. When countries have totally devastated themselves, perhaps we can revisit how the world deals with it.

Apparently one lesson was not enough. We need to learn that lesson all over again.

[Kaz]

Seriously?

[cromwell]

What is Kim Il Jong actually trying to do? I can't work it out. Where does he think he is going with this? What is North Korea going to get out of it that's any good?

I mean yes, they could enter the record books as the world's biggest car park if Trump decides he's had enough of them. Apart from that, what?

Some of the papers today were hinting at a targetted assasination. Can't see it myself.

[Workingman]

I have an inkling that he is actually blackmailing China.

The Chinese do not want a unified Korean peninsula on its border and the best way for Kim to ensure that - in his thinking - is for him to pressure them into supporting him in a ground war should there be an incursion from the South.

"If you do not, Mr Xi, I might have to let a few off, and, by the way, Beijing, Shanghai, Tianin and Hangzhou are all in range. Just saying."

[Suff]

Seriously?

Deadly. The same as those who told Chamberlain that his "Peace of our time" speech was nothing more than fanciful wishful thinking.

Our world has changed yet here we are acting as if it has not.

Tell me one single thing we have achieved with the NK regime and their nuclear ambitions through sanctions. Putin is absolutely right when he says that the people of NK would rather eat grass than give up their Nuclear progamme. He should know, he lived the USSR and the combination of fear and indoctrination.

Equally we have the situation in Iran.

Nuclear weapons are not a black art, they are the logical outcome of higher science. A science that, eventually, every country in the world will possess. This is not conjecture, it is a logical conclusion.

The only way this will be controlled and dealt with, is by the absolute certainty that using these weapons will bring total destruction down on the person or group who uses it.

Sadly, in the world today, that certainty is no longer what it was. At the end of WW2, Japan was developing its own Nuclear weapons programme, the war was going to rage on through the entire islands with the entire population of Japan getting involved in the worst kind of street by street war with children involved in fighting. In the hope that they hit the Nuclear jackpot first.

It was the actual use of those weapons against Japan which stopped the slaughter of millions and brought the world to the realisation that these weapons have changed the world and that no longer can any country expect to just land grab with power and might because they believe that might is right.

Apparently our "parenting" of the world environment, where we smack one time and give an ice cream the next, for the same offence, has set the expectation that limited use of these weapons is survivable.

We need to disabuse the world of that and it needs to happen soon. The only way I can see that is for _any_ use to be punished so severely that nobody will ever consider it again.

If we keep on trying to keep up the fallacy that Nuclear non proliferation is working, that will not happen until it is a tragedy.

We walked a tightrope for 50 years where the slightest miscalculation could have brought down global thermonuclear war on us. Finally we got off that tightrope only to face the escalating threat of "limited" nuclear war on all fronts.

For those who don't understand this, the kind of weapons Kim is creating, sitting on top of our Trident missiles, could make the UK essentially uninhabitable with just ONE missile with a full complement of 16 0.5mtonne warheads.

Want to take the risk? Kim's latest missile test puts the UK in his shooting gallery. Sure he'd need 16 missiles, not one. What consolation is that? For those who do not know, a second stage, fusion weapon, that he has demonstrated, is what is required to get that yield on a missile. The first 1mtonne bomb was the size of a large warehouse. Today you can fire one out of a large field gun. Such is the science of fusion weapons. That is now the property of NK and they will continue to refine it until they reach the same level as the US, Russia and the UK. France is still not in that ball game.

It is about time we learned the lesson that should have been learned, forever, in 1939. You cannot reason with lunatics who are in power.

If anyone thinks that the taming of the Nuclear threat will come without the cost of lives, then they are only deceiving themselves. Just as Chamberlain did.