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For those unfamiliar with how intractable this problem really is, this article provides an excellent summary: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/
by readams 9y ago
For those unfamiliar with how intractable this problem really is, this article provides an excellent summary:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-worst-problem-on-earth/528717/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-wor...
- jseliger 9y agoA useful link. Boiled down, there are really two options: attack NK or leave them to slowly but surely advance missiles and warheads. The former is a bad idea because it is likely that millions of people will die, most of them in South Korea. The latter is a bad idea because it may mean that millions will die in the future. But war is not inevitable, anymore than it was with the Soviet Union, and it's possible that the regime will eventually collapse. So rather than pursuing the near-guaranteed path, we delay and hope.
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoHow many general secretaries of the Soviet Union fed their opponents to dogs or blew them up with missiles? Short of somebody poisoning Kim Jong-un while he sleeps, I don't see a conflict free regime change or collapse.
- tsomctl 9y agoHow many mass graves are there in Siberia?
- JustAnotherPat 9y agoAfter Stalin? Not that many.
- shahar2k 9y agoand wouldn't a regime collapse mean looser controls on who has access to said nuclear weapons, and where they end up? like the Soviet Union.
- jasonlaramburu 9y agoWhat about getting Trump and Kim in a room together to hash it out? Seems like the best option for all parties.
- akhilcacharya 9y agoThat sounds like the most terrifying option available.
- krapp 9y agoNot if we can lock them both in there then forget about them.
- jessriedel 9y agoSeems strange to not mention leaving 25M people in abject poverty under a dictatorship for half a century.
- angersock 9y agoMy conviction is that, in about 20-40 years, the rest of the world is going to find a mass grave of what used to be a nation in the Korean Peninsula. When asked about this, world leaders will scratch the backs of their heads and stare at their shoes.
- Sangermaine 9y agoThat's unfair. As the other comments have noted, this is a difficult situation with few options, all of them bad. It's easy to say we should do something about the people suffering there, but what can be done without either war or the regime's cooperation?
- jessriedel 9y agoI would probably start by giving non-negligible weight to the 25M people who are currently suffering. Essentially every analysis I hear is about preventing hypothetical attacks in the future on the wealthy countries making the decisions.
- Sangermaine 9y agoYou're dodging the point. What, exactly, would you have done for these people? Invade to free them? Sparks a war of mass death across the peninsula. Try to convince the Kim regime to close the prison camps and end the totalitarian brutality? They don't seem very keen on doing that anytime soon. So what's your plan?
- jessriedel 9y agoIm dodging nothing. I have no expertise on any of this, so I can't possibly have an informed opinion. But if I'm listening to people who claim to have such opinions weigh various plans and they never once mention the North Korean people, I can reasonably infer they don't much care about them. Given that the North Korean probably fare better under military intervention, I suspect that military intervention is a better option than most people think.
- ankushnarula 9y agoThe author of the article, Mark Bowden, was interviewed by Sam Harris on his podcast: https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/must-we-accept-a-nuclear-north-korea https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/must-we-accept-a-nucl... To call this problem intractable is an understatement.
- ericfrederich 9y ago... for loose interpretations of the word summary ;-)