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Good for North Korea! It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea. We have nuclear wea

Good for North Korea! It's important that there be Mutually Assured Destruction between North Korea the imperialist US-backed South Korea. We have nuclear weapons. Who are we to say that North Korea shouldn't have them? That just wouldn't be fair.

s_q_b 11y ago
Me. I'll say it. Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate. Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet. Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed? EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    How is that gonna help?
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Presuming we get its value function correct: any number of things that will have the net effect of no one ever dying again, and by extension no one having the capability to harm others, in addition to immediately eliminating almost every existential risk to humanity as a whole. The least imaginative possibility I can think of involves switching everyday reality over from physical matter to computation; no matter what happens in that computation, the sentient beings interacting with it cannot be harmed. Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).
      - ars 11y ago
        Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? What makes you think that would happen? Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly". Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong". In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. > In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. > Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics. The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
        ars 11y ago
        > I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. Well, in fact they are, (or would be) the exact same people. But despite that we won't be "screwed". Or did you think that if strong AI showed up the Governments of the whole world would not rush to have their own? > what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. At what speed though? It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing (i.e. a human), so it might not actually be possible to upload people digitally. (If nothing else, the speed of light limits how fast you can run a CPU.) It's also not so obvious that it's even possible to copy a brain, never mind running one. All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software, if that's not possible then none of what you wrote about strong AI will happen, instead people will continue to be people and AI will just be another thing to ignore just like we ignore all the marvels we have now. > The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given. An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that. Never mind can we. Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so. I don't think the AI can, I don't think humans can. So far the only known method of making a smarter version of something is by random permutation and picking the best one. It's not an accident that all AI used today is by that method. I'm not aware of any that are programmed from first principles.
    - coffeevradar 11y ago
      Because computers will somehow be more noble than human beings. Wait, that doesn't make sense.
  - paulddraper 11y ago
    Unfortunately, if that happened, I'm pretty sure the only possible endgame is a scorched sky and humans as living batteries.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.
      - pnwhyc 11y ago
        I'll admit that I'm a complete novice on this subject but I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.
        JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories. > That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly. "Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.) Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.
  - adventured 11y ago
    Nuclear weapons aren't primarily a threat to the planet, they're a threat to densely populated cities. Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).
    - jjoonathan 11y ago
      Then what's with the "enough nukes to destroy the world x times over" numbers I remember hearing? Have we really disarmed that much? Or were the numbers exaggerated?
      - adventured 11y ago
        Nuclear war would severely harm the nations hit. Russia as a nation for example would all but cease to exist, as their population is extremely tightly clustered in the west; the US by comparison is far more spread out (Russia would have to hit every single US city that they could, in order of population, and that still wouldn't destroy the US, but it would clear out their entire arsenal on just part of one nation). The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival. Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.
  - ars 11y ago
    I kind of get the idea of what you are trying to say, but actually reading your post reads like a bunch of non-sequiturs. North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other. It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark. And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them. And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere. You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today. And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder. So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.
    - umanwizard 11y ago
      There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. The US alone has a few thousand. Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.
      - ars 11y ago
        > There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.
        umanwizard 11y ago
        Well i am happy to be proven wrong. Do you have a source/argument?
  - ldd 11y ago
    For anyone interested in this idea, read "The Evitable Confict", the last short story in "I, robot", written by Asimov.
- whistlerbrk 11y ago
  Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us". Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states. No one should have these weapons.
  - ars 11y ago
    > No one should have these weapons. But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.
    - timonovici 11y ago
      Who knows? They are just talking big - it's even more ludicrous for the only nation who ever used nuclear weapon on civilian population to still have them, am I rite?
      - ars 11y ago
        > am I rite? No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes. Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.
        timonovici 11y ago
        If my comment was meaningless platitudes, what can I make of yours? My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
- quadrangle 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- zanny 11y ago
  The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war. North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations. While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
  - s_q_b 11y ago
    You underestimate the ability of international events to quickly spiral out of control. This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.
melling 11y ago
Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first? http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/north%20korea%20satellite%20nasa%20lights%20OLD.JPG http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...
- sbuttgereit 11y ago
  You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need. Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.
pinkrooftop 11y ago
Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?
- viraptor 11y ago
  The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.
facetube 11y ago
Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor-soon-ok-lee/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...
- joshschreuder 11y ago
  Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.
- moo 11y ago
  Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2] [1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-visiting-scholars/suk-in-chang/ http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...
  - facetube 11y ago
    Interesting. Do you have any information on what was suspected to be exaggerated? I read up a bit on Chang In-suk, and saw the Guardian's reference to forum posters on NKnet (who doubted she was imprisoned), but couldn't find any of the original posts or supporting evidence. This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.
yongjik 11y ago
Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition. There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out. I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)
- dogma1138 11y ago
  South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.
PhasmaFelis 11y ago
Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.

s_q_b 11y ago

Me. I'll say it. Any regime which systemstically implements slave labor, mass starvation, and utter lack of human rights should not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. We do not want mutually assured destruction, especially with a nation controlled by a non-rational actor. The principle won't operate. Unfortunately, it is now too late. North Korea has a fusion bomb. Once second closer on the doomsday clock.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
I would go further and say "nobody should have a nuclear weapon". We only have the one planet. Can we hurry up and create strong AI already, before someone gets everyone killed? EDIT: Somehow I didn't expect that offhand ha-ha-only-serious comment to kick off a massive discussion about the capabilities of AI. Fun, but not my intention.
- sologoub 11y ago
  How is that gonna help?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Presuming we get its value function correct: any number of things that will have the net effect of no one ever dying again, and by extension no one having the capability to harm others, in addition to immediately eliminating almost every existential risk to humanity as a whole. The least imaginative possibility I can think of involves switching everyday reality over from physical matter to computation; no matter what happens in that computation, the sentient beings interacting with it cannot be harmed. Many of the folks thinking about and working on solutions to existential risk consider AI pretty much the universal solution (and, at the same time, consider unfriendly AI one of the notable existential threats).
    - ars 11y ago
      Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? What makes you think that would happen? Be logically consistent please, either people will not set off nukes, and also program AI "correctly". Or they will set off nukes and program AI "wrong". In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > Wait, so the same people you think are unable to handle nuclear weapons, you would assume they would program the AI the way you want? I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. > In either case AI has nothing to do with safety from nukes. > Strong AI is not a God, it does not have the ability to do the things you are imagining. Among other problems, what makes you think those things are even possible in the first place? No matter how good the AI, it still has to follow the laws of physics. The laws of physics would govern the computational substrate on which everything else runs; what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given.
        ars 11y ago
        > I certainly hope the set of people with access to nuclear weapons would not be the same people building AI, or we'd indeed be quite screwed. Well, in fact they are, (or would be) the exact same people. But despite that we won't be "screwed". Or did you think that if strong AI showed up the Governments of the whole world would not rush to have their own? > what runs on that substrate can emulate anything it likes. At what speed though? It's not clear that an emulation in a computer would be anywhere near as fast as the actual thing (i.e. a human), so it might not actually be possible to upload people digitally. (If nothing else, the speed of light limits how fast you can run a CPU.) It's also not so obvious that it's even possible to copy a brain, never mind running one. All your assumptions are predicated on the ability to emulate a human in software, if that's not possible then none of what you wrote about strong AI will happen, instead people will continue to be people and AI will just be another thing to ignore just like we ignore all the marvels we have now. > The major assumption I'm making is that we can successfully build strong AI (AI capable of self-improvement past human), which seems plausible but not a given. An even larger assumption is that it's even possible to do that. Never mind can we. Can an intelligence program something smarter than itself? I don't think so. I don't think the AI can, I don't think humans can. So far the only known method of making a smarter version of something is by random permutation and picking the best one. It's not an accident that all AI used today is by that method. I'm not aware of any that are programmed from first principles.
  - coffeevradar 11y ago
    Because computers will somehow be more noble than human beings. Wait, that doesn't make sense.
- paulddraper 11y ago
  Unfortunately, if that happened, I'm pretty sure the only possible endgame is a scorched sky and humans as living batteries.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Science fiction movies are not even remotely a useful model of the outcome of either friendly or unfriendly AI. Skynet or the Matrix are not even close to how bad or how fast an unfriendly AI would be, given that the protagonists of those movies have even the slightest hope. And conversely, no science fiction movie I've ever seen provides any useful depiction of friendly AI; we're not talking about Jarvis or Data here.
    - pnwhyc 11y ago
      I'll admit that I'm a complete novice on this subject but I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        > I think Transcendence did a halfway decent job of showing some possible applications of friendly AI. Interesting, I hadn't seen that one. While that doesn't give a very good impression of what the timescale could be (though it actually seems fairly plausible for an uploaded human that just runs faster with more data but doesn't attempt iterative self-improvement), it does suggest at least some possibilities in ways I haven't seen in other movies, and in relatively few short stories. > That said, I don't think I'd constitute the conflation of any human mind and supercomputing as friendly. "Friendly AI" is a specific term of art, referring to AI that values sentient beings, and whose value function involves modeling and satisfying the value functions of sentient beings. (Its opposite, "unfriendly AI", refers to any AI that doesn't value sentient beings; that doesn't just mean "actively hostile", but also simply "doesn't explicitly care", either one of which would create an existential threat. For instance, a paperclip-building AI that sees people as another source of matter that isn't paperclips yet.) Almost all sentient beings tend to hold their own continued existence in high value.
- adventured 11y ago
  Nuclear weapons aren't primarily a threat to the planet, they're a threat to densely populated cities. Five countries detonated 2,000 nukes over 35 years. You could simultaneously set off every existing nuclear warhead inside of Wyoming and it would have a negligible health impact on most of the rest of humanity. You couldn't come even remotely close to killing everyone with nukes, unless the global arsenals were vastly expanded; the US alone has 27,000 cities. Russia's entire stockpile could kill at worst 1/3 of all Americans, assuming they all worked properly and hit their targets. The notion that nuclear war could end the human race, is entirely a myth (which is not to downplay the actual damage such would cause).
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    Then what's with the "enough nukes to destroy the world x times over" numbers I remember hearing? Have we really disarmed that much? Or were the numbers exaggerated?
    - adventured 11y ago
      Nuclear war would severely harm the nations hit. Russia as a nation for example would all but cease to exist, as their population is extremely tightly clustered in the west; the US by comparison is far more spread out (Russia would have to hit every single US city that they could, in order of population, and that still wouldn't destroy the US, but it would clear out their entire arsenal on just part of one nation). The desire has always been to make sure everyone is properly afraid of a nuclear war, because of the destruction it would indeed cause. It's desirable for it to be considered off the table entirely, a true last resort response. There is a large gulf between an outcome that destroys all of the relevant cities in the US and ending the human race. The 'mistake' is an intentional over-estimation of how much destruction the whole can cause (Why? To properly cause immense fear, so global nuclear war is thought of as a humanity ending event; and that's probably sane reasoning). Back in reality, only a few nations would be heavily destroyed, and the amount of radiation most of the rest of countries would absorb wouldn't matter in regards to survival. Some will claim it would cause nuclear winter, destroy the global food and fresh water supply etc. It wouldn't come close to causing that. Nearly the entire planet would remain fundamentally just fine (the nukes would be focused on urban areas anyway). We know for a fact that large numbers of nuclear detonations (eg 178 in 1962) don't just magically spread globally and start killing everyone via destroying the food supply or other similar mass outcome events. Specific small areas of the planet would not be fine of course, they would be completely destroyed. An extremely small percentage of arable land could be destroyed, even if it was specifically targeted. Within less than a century you'd never know a global nuclear war occurred as far as obvious signs in nature are concerned, outside of the specific areas that were hit.
- ars 11y ago
  I kind of get the idea of what you are trying to say, but actually reading your post reads like a bunch of non-sequiturs. North Korea not having a nuclear weapon is so much more important than nobody having one, that the two discussions have virtually nothing to do with each other. It's not one is just a slightly greater degree than the other, they are so different they are not even in the same ballpark. And what does having just one planet have at all to do with nuclear weapons? I'm not seeing the connection. All the nuclear bombs on earth would do nothing whatsoever to the planet, and barely anything to the inhabitants except for a minority of them. And then the sudden jump to strong AI? Hu? That came out of nowhere. You imply that strong AI has some sort of connection to "everyone killed", first of all, how exactly would everyone get killed anyway? Humans don't have the ability to do that, not today. And strong AI would, if anything, make it easier to do that, not harder. So your post really is quite perplexing if you actually read it.
  - umanwizard 11y ago
    There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. The US alone has a few thousand. Not to mention that nuclear winter is a very real (though unproven) concern.
    - ars 11y ago
      > There are definitely enough nuclear bombs to wipe out a large fraction of earth's population, if not all. No, that is simply not true. Not in the slightest.
      - umanwizard 11y ago
        Well i am happy to be proven wrong. Do you have a source/argument?
- ldd 11y ago
  For anyone interested in this idea, read "The Evitable Confict", the last short story in "I, robot", written by Asimov.
whistlerbrk 11y ago
Agree with what you said and I'll underscore the 'especially' clause of your point regarding rational actors. I encourage people to watch Errol Morris' Fog of War which examines the life of Robert McNamara. In the documentary he states that a principle lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is that "rationality will not save us". Rational actors believing they are proceeding in the best interests of their countries can allow a situation to escalate and cause the mutual annihilation of their civilizations. This was the case when John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were heads of their respective states. No one should have these weapons.
- ars 11y ago
  > No one should have these weapons. But North Korea not having them is so much more important that even mentioning other countries in the same discussion is ludicrous.
  - timonovici 11y ago
    Who knows? They are just talking big - it's even more ludicrous for the only nation who ever used nuclear weapon on civilian population to still have them, am I rite?
    - ars 11y ago
      > am I rite? No you are not. You are being simplistic and trying to make a point with meaningless platitudes. Intellectual "shortcuts" like that will not lead you to any sort of understanding.
      - timonovici 11y ago
        If my comment was meaningless platitudes, what can I make of yours? My arguments was that it doesn't matter what one is claiming - in the end what matters is what you do. The americans are the only ones so far to have nuked other people, and they still get to keep their missiles. Don't you think we are way too forgiving with them?
quadrangle 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
zanny 11y ago
The old doomsday clock was about the USSR and US having arsenals of thousands of nuclear missiles to render the world inhospitable if they ever declared open war. North Korea could probably kill a sizable chunk of the 25 million people living in the metro area of Seoul, but would otherwise not be able to inflict harm on the US, at least not yet. And we would be their nuclear retaliator if they attacked anyone - we know all their military bases, and a nuclear attack on South Korea would see instant retaliation upon all their installations. While China does not want to deal with the refugee crisis that would result from a post-NK scenario, they would definitely never fight the US directly because they know full well that doomsday scenario would play out in nuclear war with the US.
- s_q_b 11y ago
  You underestimate the ability of international events to quickly spiral out of control. This is an n-body problem, and one of those particles is a borderline insane government.

melling 11y ago

Shouldn't they work on getting electricity first? http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/north%20korea%20satellite%20nasa%20lights%20OLD.JPG http://cdn.citylab.com/media/img/citylab/legacy/2012/12/18/n...

sbuttgereit 11y ago
You would think. But I suspect the few people that have the power to make use of the nation's resources have all the electricity they need. Since they simply take what they want from the rest of the populous, the desires of the rest of the people simply don't matter enough.

pinkrooftop 11y ago

Is it really mutual destruction if North Korea has nothing to lose ?

viraptor 11y ago
The leaders still can lose their lives. Which is pretty much what they care about.

facetube 11y ago

Here's a North Korean prison camp survivor's testimony from 2003. Try to read it without vomiting. This is the country you think should have nuclear weapons: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor-soon-ok-lee/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3071464/ns/us_news-only/t/survivor...

joshschreuder 11y ago
Wow. Thanks for posting, I had no idea about any of that. I mean, I knew NK was a serious human rights offender, but when hearing specifics really hit home how bad it is. Atrocious.
moo 11y ago
Chang In-suk [1], head of the North Korean Defectors’ Association in Seoul at the time, says Lee Soon-ok is a liar. The Guardian tackles the question, "Why do North Korean defector testimonies so often fall apart?" [2] [1] http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-visiting-scholars/suk-in-chang/ http://uskoreainstitute.org/research/visiting-scholars/past-... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-korean-defector-testimonies-so-often-fall-apart http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-ko...
- facetube 11y ago
  Interesting. Do you have any information on what was suspected to be exaggerated? I read up a bit on Chang In-suk, and saw the Guardian's reference to forum posters on NKnet (who doubted she was imprisoned), but couldn't find any of the original posts or supporting evidence. This sort of stuff would be really really bad to fabricate IMO, considering the scale of known-true suffering going on in North Korea.

yongjik 11y ago

Erm, "Mutually Assured Destruction" sort of requires the destruction to be assured mutually, by definition. There's no way they can destroy America. In the most lucky(??) case, they might be able to destroy a city or two before getting wiped out. I doubt they could destroy even South Korea. (Sure, they can kill millions, but South Korea is kinda democratic enough to survive that, and you can bet my ass that the North Korean regime will be wiped out.)

dogma1138 11y ago
South Korea is pretty much Seoul and NK can flatten (in theory) it with unguided rockets, Seoul is 30 or so miles of the border this is within range of even some field howitzers with RAP shells.

PhasmaFelis 11y ago

Hm. Wouldn't have expected NK internet propagandists to be paying attention to Hacker News.