Yep....we have had decades of buck passing....it's what politicians do....avoid controversial actions is written into their dna. I kind of hate those b******s...they get to slip off into the night and fcuk the next generation.

How do we regard those politicians who allowed Hitler to become as powerful as he did? Isreal stuck first in their second war because they saw what was coming....they struck before they were ready....They didn't give a fcuk about world opinion. We lost our opportunity to deal with NK like that a long time ago....far too soft on insistence with China when China was relatively weak.

The time to deal with NK militarily on a first strike opportunity with minimal loss has been and gone....Red lines should have been set a long time ago...and I'm afraid most of this has been democratic party hand wringing.

Any course of action now is a sh1tshow.

Before America choose a military action they would start removing their people from SK and their base.....North Korea aren't stupid. As soon as they know it's coming for real they have nothing to lose.

Edited by Stirlingsays (11 Aug 2017 9.11am)

You lance it...or you make it rich and give into its coming blackmail.....You end up doing one of the two....or you do nothing...which seems to be a favourite of politicians...so no one ends up saying mean things to them...and you end up playing chicken.

If you lance it....you will end up losing Seoul.....What comes in North Korea afterwards? We have to come to some type of understanding with China....but I'm not sure that's possible.

One thing is for sure...I'm not ok with paying one pence of danegeld to those fcukers.

Edited by Stirlingsays (11 Aug 2017 9.24am)

Neither side are lead by nut jobs with their fingers on the trigger. Both sides 'leaders' are the front men for some pretty serious strategic thinkers and players.

The cost of losing Seoul and the optimistically tens of thousands of South Korean lives is a pretty big one, if your South Korean - and will have serious economic impact across the far east.

And it doesn't guarantee military success. North Korea is a difficult country to invade. The only really viable border is South Korea and staging post Japan, all of which are in air and missile range (and both likely to suffer retaliatory strikes if they support US military action).

Then there is the fact that North Korea seems to be highly militarised and spent the last 30 years preparing for a fight against a US backed invasion.

Military strikes won't make a difference, they'll need to invade to bring down the regime.

But potentially, an attack is risking full scale retaliation against Japan and South Korea, potentially including nuclear, chemical and biological weapons - Probably against major population centres.

That could be catastrophic economically in its impact on global economic markets, and cause massive causalities to two vital Western allies in the far east (probably the two strongest).

That's before counting the casualties on the North Korean side, and US armed forces. That's a very big gamble to take for the US.

North Korea has had a whole lot of missiles pointing at Seoul for how long? Any strike on the North should/has to take into account the near certainty of Seoul's destruction too.