Update: Here’s the answer to the above question:
Here are some quick thoughts on tonight’s breaking news that North Korea has likely just tested a massive nuclear device, possibly a hydrogen bomb after claiming it already had one such missile ready bomb.
My thought is that Kim believes he must have a nuclear capacity threatening enough to protect his country from attack by the United States. I do not think it is possible to convince him to give up this firmly held belief. As I will explain, I think it is possible to convince him he is about to achieve that goal and agree to stop producing nuclear missiles once he feels he has all he needs.
Once North Korea has merely one hydrogen bomb which it can reliably expect would explode over any large United State population center, possibly Hawaii, they have assured that the U.S. would never attack them. They wouldn’t really need more than two.
Unlike the mutually assured destruction that kept the cold war from going nuclear, all North Korea needs is those one or two incredibly powerful weapons.
It is probably too late to convince Kim to give up perfecting a deliverable hydrogen bomb. However, it may be possible to convince him to limit production of bombs and missile delivery systems to a number that he’d believe would be a more than adequate deterrent to ever being attacked by the United States.
For example, perhaps we could convince him that his being able to destroy all of Hawaii and Los Angeles represents the win against the United State that he has been striving for.
It shouldn’t take much brilliant diplomacy to make a compelling argument that there could be no winners in a nuclear exchange where he made Hawaii and Los Angeles uninhabitable while we leveled his entire country.
I never thought Kim was insane, even unpredictable as some commenters like Andrea Mitchell just said in a live breaking new MSNBC broadcast.
The question is whether he is cognizant enough of America values to believe that despite Trump’s warlike bluster (see addendum) he’d never be willing to sacrifice the lives of the 1 ½ million people that live in Hawaii and much of the Pacific Fleet, and the four million people who live in Los Angeles just so he could whip North Korea off the map.
Addendum: Thanks Donald!
President Donald Trump's warning Tuesday that North Korea "will be met with fire and fury" if it continues its saber rattling sparked new fears that the standoff over the regime's advancing nuclear and missile programs could devolve into a shooting war.
The seemingly off-the-cuff broadside also reignited concerns raised during the presidential campaign that Trump's tough rhetoric, including his previous calls to build up the American nuclear arsenal, could be dangerously destabilizing.
"The greatest North Korean threat we face is not from a nuclear-tipped missile hitting the U.S. mainland but from Washington stumbling into an inadvertent nuclear war on the Korean peninsula," Siegfried Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a nuclear expert who has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, said in an email.
"The president's statements exacerbate" such concerns, Hecker said.
The president's remarks drew an almost immediate response from North Korea, which issued a statement saying it was "carefully examining" a plan to launch a preemptive strike on the U.S. territory of Guam, which lies about 2,000 miles away. from Politico
Sunday, Sep 3, 2017 · 2:29:10 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Exactly — This is my point… I put this comment on as an update. We have to accept that N. Korea already IS a nuclear state and we have to deal with the only country in the world that is using this capacity to threaten us. We have to understand, Trump has to understand, that they aren’t making an offensive threat. Kim Jung Un seems to believe, or at least professes to believe, that his threats are a deterrent. In fact what we will have once Kim as a few hydrogen bomb ICBMs is a version of MAD: Neither side will ever use nuclear bombs because to do so would assure unacceptable destruction on both side, perhaps 5 million Americans and much of the 25 million N. Koreans.
It is simply self-evident that the U.S. has to accept North Korea possessing a stockpile of nuclear weapons, unless we are willing to obliterate them with a massive first strike. This of course would kill millions of innocent North Korean civilians as well as thousands of South Korean and Japanese civilians due to radioactive fallout. The ground bursts and earth penetrating warheads necessary to take out nuclear weapons generate massive fallout downwind.
Honestly, we did this to ourselves. By their endless bellicose threats and especially the illegal invasion of Iraq, U.S. leaders encouraged nations from North Korea to Iran to acquire nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible, lest they be the next victims of ‘regime change’.
There may have been a narrow window of opportunity for negotiation, but rabid war-mongering statements from Trump and his enablers on both sides of the aisle have killed that possibility. Seriously, the North Koreans at this point would be foolish not to pursue a robust nuclear capability, given all the threats the U.S. has aimed at them.
And don’t kid yourself; the relentless absurdist logic of the Cold War applies here. One or two deliverable warheads is not enough for North Korea to be confident of their deterrent power. They will feel utterly compelled to deploy at least 20-30, dispersed to various launch points, to be sure a few would survive a U.S. first strike. Every time U.S. leaders openly muse about a ‘decapitation strike’ and deploying anti-missile systems, North Korea’s leaders will feel compelled to build even more warheads.
One could say the whole thing is just MAD.