OK this is even stupider:

[halialkers]

 So, not satisfied with merely sending a carrier to the Indian Ocean, Dorito Benito has decided to treat nuclear weapons deployments to counter a nuclear state perfectly happy to use them on South Korea and Japan as a first option. 

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-s-options-north-korea-include-placing-nukes-south-korea-n743571

The great grimdark irony of nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy the last few decades since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that they're essentially super-destructive apocalyptic hollow weapons never actually intended to be used and thus in a real sense the ultimate military-industrial complex dream made manifest. Deploying the damned things as a first resort with intent to wage a nuclear war is a drastic upward spiral of aggression from the usual pantomime involving said hollow weaponry. 

Again, North Korea's suspended the armistice with South Korea and been in a legal state of war for four years, but this does not justify enabling the use of weaponry that could if fired off depopulate the entire peninsula and probably would, given that Dorito Benito is probably going to go for the really big booms in lieu of everything else. To say nothing of what happens if the PRC has American nuclear weapons right next to its border with intent to be fired off. 

Where the probable reactions are 1) shit bricks, 2) bigger nuclear standoff with the PRC able to hit US troops in South Korea just fine even if they can't hit the USA and thus a potential second Great Power nuclear flash point and a third, actually, depending on what if anything happens with the South China Sea situation. So for those keeping score, there's the ongoing South China Sea situation where the PRC is going full Argentina on the Falklands and saying "Because it's near us we own it", Syria and the potential US-Russia nuclear war there, and now a potential US China war on the other end of the PRC's sea borders with the Korean Peninsula. 

I guess Dorito Benito wasn't kidding when he said he wanted to fire the damned things off. 

Comments

[garote]

The rulers of North Korea are wacko, but they're not stupid. They know that the second they cause any newsworthy number of US or Chinese casualties their border walls will collapse like cardstock and Pyongyang will go up in flames. Then they'd lose access to their sports cars and fine dining.

The US does not need to station nukes anywhere near North Korea to remain capable of annihilating it. Trump's team knows this, North Korean leadership knows this, China knows this. This is NBC news trying to drive ad clicks with stress hormones, nothing more.

[halialkers]

Are we so certain they're not stupid or that Kim Jong Un isn't? He might be dumb enough to think he can keep the ol' okie doke going with shelling South Korean cities or trying to sink South Korean ships for attention even when the climate is clearly changed.

It is true that the USA does not need to, but under this Administration what it needs and what it does aren't going to be remotely the same thing. >.>

[garote]

Despite Trump's campaign trail bloviating that he "knows more than the generals do", I don't think he's actually going to be able to get his sticky cheeto-dust fingers all over every major decision the military makes. They'll present him with options and he'll choose one, but he's not going to get to spin mad scenarios out of whole cloth without Congress getting up his metaphorical orange ass.

On the other side, North Korea is China's collection of "useful idiots". Geopolitically, they have nothing to lose by letting NK run riot, and plenty to gain by negotiating to intervene when NK threatens someone else. That makes NK a living, breathing trust issue between China and the US: China wouldn't trust the US to intervene, let alone invade, inside NK -- too close to home -- and the US can't trust that China wouldn't just hand NK a nuclear weapon under the fence and let it make good on its lunatic aspirations.

Imagine if Canadians had a feverous hatred for Russia, and kept publicly announcing that if they only had a nuke, they would drop it on Moscow, and the US - sharing a long border with Canada and on good terms - kept saying, "Hey, not our problem! But if you fuck with our neighbors we'll condemn you as a bully and a warmonger and wade into the conflict." The only outcome to that scenario that doesn't give Russia huge losses is to convince the US to puppet the Canadian leadership and/or lobby on behalf of the Russians until the warmongering fades into the background.

Would the US bother to do that? What would Russia's best move be?