Steven Vincent Johnson wrote:
It would appear that North Korea has demonstrated to the world that it can
detonate a nuclear bomb.
I still doubt it.
Anyway, Kim will not live forever, and nations like North Korea
seldom last for long, so I do not think it matters much. The lesson
of the cold war is that it is often best to do nothing provocative,
stand your ground, and wait for things to improve. People tend to
exaggerate the gravity of these "crises," as they are called before
everyone forgets they happened. The U.S. did not go to war over the
Quemoy and Matsu "crisis" in 1954, and yet we survived. The U.S. did
go to war over the Tonkin Gulf attack and the Iraqi WMD crisis, but
both events turned out to be fabricated, and responding to them on
this scale was a mistake, to put it mildly.
- Jed
