War Between The United States And North Korea Is Inevitable

War Between The United States And North Korea Is Inevitable

I have been warning everyone for weeks that a miscalculation or a mistake is going to lead to a war between the US and North Korea that will result in the use of nuclear weapons in battle for the first time since 1945.

I promised myself that I would not watch the Ken Burns series Vietnam. After all, I had four friends killed there and some friends wounded. A Purple Heart certificate sits on the wall in my study. I broke the promise to myself. I watched the first two episode of the series yesterday. I focused on how four U.S. presidents saw Vietnam. Let me summarize what I saw:

President Eisenhower: He gave France hundreds of millions of dollars in support to keep them fighting in Vietnam. At one point, he was financing 80% of France’s costs to fight the war. France had over 100,000 casualties in Vietnam. President Eisenhower would not send US troops. He decided that the war was unwinnable.

President Kennedy: One quote in the show was most telling as follows:

“These people don’t like us. But if Vietnam falls to the Communists, I will lose the 1964 election.”

At the John F. Kennedy Library, I purchased a book: Vietnam Had Kennedy Lived. This is some heavy reading and quite scholarly. The conclusion is that Kennedy would have stayed in Vietnam until after the 1964 election and then started to wind down US involvement even if the North Vietnamese won.

President Johnson: Despite his humble background and education, Johnson’s biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin described him as a political genius. Johnson believed in The Domino Theory. In other words, if South Vietnam fell, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, etc. would follow.

President Nixon: Alan Greenspan described Nixon as a dark and troubled man with a brilliant mind. President Nixon was a master of foreign affairs. He too believed in the Domino Theory.

With Johnson and Nixon strong believers in the Domino Theory, it was inevitable that Vietnam would be a long and a bloody war for the USA. North Vietnam won at the cost of some 3.25 million people killed. 20% of their territory is a “no man’s land” due to land mines and poisonous chemicals. After the Vietnam war ended in 1975, an additional 50,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed by land mines and unexploded ordinance.

Let us go to the present. Everyone thinks that Donald Trump is wild and irresponsible. Even if Hillary Clinton or Mike Pence were president, a war with North Korea would be inevitable. It would escalate to a nuclear conflict. The mindset is there as it was in Vietnam. It will start with some mistake or misunderstanding. It will quickly escalate into a nuclear exchange because that sort of firepower will be needed to destroy North Korea’s military capabilities.

Let me expose some fallacies as follows:

1)    Kim Jung Un and his senior management team are phantoms hiding in heavily-fortified bunkers all the time. Wrong, they do appear in public. Rest assured that the following countries have “eyes on” Kim and his management team 24 hours a-day seven days a week:

The US

Japan

South Korea

China

Israel (Due to fear of North Korea sharing its nuclear technology with Iran.)

The dream of all these countries would be a stealth drone strike that would kill Kim Jung Un and his management team. If this happened the country would collapse.

2)    Massive nuclear weapons will have to be employed with casualties in the range of 25 million plus. Nuclear weapons will be employed to “take out” military targets. My educated guess is one million casualties.

3)    South Korea and Japan will be heavily damaged. There will be some casualties and damage in South Korea and Japan. China should be very concerned. When things get really irrational, North Korean nuclear weapons and poison gas might be used against China.

What will follow will be a temporary fall in world financial markets with a nasty recession to follow. Violent protests will erupt all over the world. These protests will make the Vietnam War protests seem pale in comparison.