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That’s literally my point. Everyone, including them, knows they’d lose and the gravy train would stop. There is no way they’d ever do a premature attack. It’s i
by SEJeff 6y ago
That’s literally my point. Everyone, including them, knows they’d lose and the gravy train would stop. There is no way they’d ever do a premature attack. It’s insane.
- cle 6y agoHistory is filled with people doing insane things.
- lambdasquirrel 6y agoWell the kicker is that the North Korean foreign policy is predicated on them trying to appear as insane as possible to other people, without really being actually too insane. And maybe ironically, not really an act that any sane person want to play or be a part of.
- ganafagol 6y agoBut the people involved literally don't have a choice. What do you think their alternative is? Let it be, go home, take a beer out of the fridge, lay down on the sofa, watch some football and call it a day? That's not how the life of those generals looks like. Easy to claim what "a sane person" would do from the arrogant POV of a western average citizen, but reality looks very different.
- samus 6y agoTheir defense policy is the same as the US: don't attack, else you risk slagging of your city/ies. This is the core of MAD. You don't maintain MAD by not promising you are going to shoot back.
- arethuza 6y agoSoviet generals were all for a war with the US at the time of the Cuban Missile crisis even though they knew they'd come off very badly. I don't think there was anything unusually irrational about them - people just do crazy things in situations like that.
- chefkoch 6y agoBecause they thought the US would nuke them first. And from what i read there we're enough crazy generals who wanted to exactly do that during the cold war.
- arethuza 6y agoAbsolutely, a lot of people wanted a "preventative" war against the Soviet Union notably Curtis LeMay: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-and-world-war-iii https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/06/19/the-general-an... I've even had people on HN arguing with me that such a war was the "rational" thing to do - which I found rather disturbing, to say the least.