[charles-salvia]

The assessment predicts: "Tens or hundreds of thousands could become casualties" ... in the event of an all-out DRPK/(US+ROK) conflict.

One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs? In that case, there are ... still likely tens of thousands of civilian deaths happening as the status quo in North Korean labor camps[1]. Allowing the regime to continue to exist also has a major cost in human lives. I'm not saying war is clearly a superior option - I'm saying this whole situation is mostly losses.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_North_Korea

[AndrewKemendo]

This almost always goes unsaid so thanks for saying it.

The general conditions of North Korean population is staggeringly bad. Eating grass and bark soup [1], iterant cannibalism [2] etc... When you consider the Prison situation without sounding glib, it's near holocaust levels of horrors [3].

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2010/07/starving-nort...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05...

[3] http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/Reportoft...

Say what you will about international relations, pre-emptive war etc... but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps is universal then there is certainly a case to be made for North Korean conflict.

It's admittedly 1000x more complex of course.

[AlexeyBrin]

> but if the moral argument for entering WW-II for the purpose of liberating those in the concentration camps

Hugh? Sorry, but who told you that someone entered the WW2 to liberate someone from the concentration camps ? Liberating the camps was a consequence of the end of the war not the reason any country entered in the conflict.

[AndrewKemendo]

To be clear - I'm not making the point that the US entered WW-II predominantly for the humanitarian reason of liberating the camps. In fact we didn't know much about them when we entered in 1941.

Rather, one of the strongest used moral cases for WWII (post facto) was the liberation.

We have even stronger evidence of this same moral case in Korea, than we did in WWII, so if we're consistent then there is a good case to be made here.

One could argue however that this post facto moral back patting in WWII is just how we justify it. So if that's the case you're making then I got nothin for ya.

[JumpCrisscross]

Waging foreign policy based on morality over tangible interests has a poor track record. Korea isn't Germany. We could count on West Germany bouncing back on its people and industry. North Korea would involve cultural engineering on a scale and at a depth without precedent. Cost estimates regularly wander into trillions of dollars, and that's just for the first few years.

[AndrewKemendo]

Oh, god help us if it actually escalates to that point. I'm more than intimately aware of the ramifications, as I was an intelligence officer in the pacific and heavily involved in NK issues.

It's probably the biggest can of worms out there right now quite frankly.

[panglott]

"Allowing the regime to continue to exist" is a backwards way of looking at things that serves to legitimate invasions. The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world. Invading the north (or provoking it with special operations) would be a positive action for which the US would be responsible. North Korea is a bad state, and bad for its people, but the unspeakable carnage that would result from major ground warfare on the Korean peninsula is something else entirely.

[aphextron]

>The US is a superpower, but that doesn't mean that other nation-states exist because we deign to suffer their existence—that's a very colonialist way of looking at the world.

This is a question of international consensus, not US will. Under the definition of sovereignty agreed upon by the international community, DPRK has forfeited its' right to sovereignty by repeated human rights abuses, WMD development, and aggression toward it's neighbors. Essentially, if a state fails to uphold it's responsibility to its' citizens, sovereignty is forfeited. Admittedly this is a hard thing to judge, but a line must be drawn somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_sovereignty

[timthelion]

It is Trump making the decision now, not the international community. I'll also remind you, that the only country in the entire world that has extensively used WMDs is the US. The US has used Nukes (WWII), and is also responsible for the most extensive use of chemical weapons of any county (Vietnam). NK has never used a WMD.

[thrden]

Lots of countries had widespread Chemical weapons usage.

Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_weapons_program

Israel used white phosphorous till 2013: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22310544

the Soviet Union was accused of using chemical weapons in afghanistan: http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/afghan/report.pdf

The UN stated that Cuban units used VX as well as Sarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#Angola

even the vietnamese used chemical weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_border_raids_in_Tha...

None of these examples include the use of chemical weapons in WWII or WWI. During these wars most major european countries used chemical weapons of some kind.

these instances don't excuse their usage, But I don't believe much is gained by pretending the rest of the world is blameless.

[timthelion]

My point was, that OP was saying that countries that have and use WMDs are not legitimate. I agree. I don't think most governments are legit. But it seems NK is rather mild when it comes to WMDs. The US has far far more of them than NK and actually uses them.

[ethbro]

Let's add some context.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 129-226k dead

Nazi Holocaust: 4.9-11m dead

Soviet Holodomor: 1.8-7.5m dead

Cambodian Genocide: 1.7-3m dead

Armenian Genocide: 800k-1.5m dead

Vietnam War (all deaths, US period): 1-3m dead

In terms of human death, WMDs have historically been the least of conflict-affected people's worries, compared to starvation and drawn out total war.

[jerf]

"It is Trump making the decision now, not the international community."

It may not be "the international community", but it is certainly not just Trump. South Korea, China, and lately Japan all have an interest and are actively attempting to steer results.

I mean, I'd bet if you consult your model of Trump that you think is acting it will tell you that being a crazy madman unconstrained by rationality or morality he unilaterally nuked Pyongyang last month. That model applied consistently, instead of piecemeal whenever cynically convenient, is clearly not predictive. (If that is not your personal model, timthelion, I am sure this message reaches many people for whom that is their unexamined model, so still not a waste.)

[charles-salvia]

That's a subjective value call. It depends on how many North Koreans are being brutalized/dying right now. We don't have that number, but it's likely that tens of thousands of the hundreds of thousands of political prisoners will die of starvation or execution within a few years. So unspeakable carnage is already the default state, and we already have a situation here that is comparable to Khmer Rouge or Stalinist Russia levels of human-rights violations.

Regardless, the colonial past of Western powers is not relevant here. I am not suggesting a policy of Imperialism. I am just pointing out that North Korea's very existence comes with a serious cost in human life. This might be something we should at least factor in when weighing the heavy costs of destroying the Kim regime.

[panglott]

I don't want to minimize the North Korean regime, but you're talking about some of the world's largest armies engaged in a total war to the death in an area half the size of California with twice the population. You're talking about rocket artillery bombardment of a city of 30 million people, major tank warfare in population centers, and a serious risk of the use of nuclear weapons. This is warfare at a scale we haven't seen in generations.

"Allowing it to exist" is a negative action (in that we don't have to do anything for it to happen), whereas invading North Korea is a positive action. Framing "allowing it to exist" as a positive action makes it seem like a choice between two positive actions, which makes invasion seem more palatable. I'm sure there's a trolley problem about this, but people tend to view the ethics of positive actions more seriously than negative actions.

Oh, here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/

[YZF]

Wars are very rarely (read as never) fought as total wars to the death. Nobody can predict what exactly would happen if the conflict turns violent. The range of outcomes is huge. The regime may not be able to sustain itself if a war breaks out. There could be mass surrender/defections. Certainly it's hard to see how NK can sustain a war for any length of time given the state of its economy and the resources it has. The worst case scenario is indeed very ugly but IMO not very likely. As crazy as the regime appears to be, self preservation must be one of its objectives.

[JeremyBanks]

Are you trying to argue that there is a moral difference between action and inaction, or just a political difference? It's certainly something that historic philosophers have spent a lot of time discussing, but that doesn't mean their moral confusion needs to be taken seriously.

[panglott]

Any use of power against other people is necessarily both a moral and a political question. I wouldn't take someone seriously who ~hasn't~ thought hard about the moral question involved.

[sqeaky]

What does it matter who is responsible if many 100s of thousands of lives can be saved. Blame is just a social construct, death is a bit more permanent. NK is killing thousands in labor camps and will continue to do so. This is all without consider what happens if they get a nuke on missile into civilized cities.

Blame doesn't matter if stops a nuke in downtown Seoul or other Major city.

[JumpCrisscross]

The flip side of your argument is it accepts the Kims' ownership over North Korea's land and population. The concept of legitimacy is fuzzy. There is gray area between defense and colonialist conquest.

[panglott]

It's implicit in your statement that the moral repugnancy of the Kim regime makes any acceptance of its existence intolerable. But that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime; but invading countries is also generally immoral and the consequences of Korean War II are also morally repugnant.

[JumpCrisscross]

> that clearly implies we should remove the Kim regime

No, it just means we can discuss it without moral censure. There have been lots of multilateral and unilateral interventions, covert and overt, since World War II. Global stability is built on great powers not warring with each other.

[0xfeba]

I think one of the major reasons no one does anything about it, ignoring the buffer China enjoys from the US (via proxy), is the humanitarian crisis from the entire NK population after the war is over. Who is going to help them? China? SK?

[lettergram]

South Korea already has plans in place for that. I can't find the article at the moment, but they feel super bad for and about North Korea and really want to help if they could

[sverhagen]

Not a very literate and informed reply I'm having here, but just from friendly conversations with a few South Koreans, what I'm getting is that the current generation, many of which haven't grown up in an active war situation, have a much smaller appetite for reunification than their elders may have had. And while they have plans in place (there's a Ministry of Unification) I doubt it that South Korea has money set aside for the real cost of unification (since those amounts would be so tremendous that it'd probably be economically and politically irresponsible to withdraw that much money from the active economy for this long). But then, I'm as little an economic expert as I am an expert on Korea's reunification...

[deckiedan]

I spent some time in South Korea working with several churches there - they are in tears over the situation in the North every day praying for them. I'm sure if/when it happens there will be a staggeringly huge amount of money poured in from the churches, and other religious people around the world (on top of everything the governments put in...)

[panglott]

Everything I've read about a postwar reconstruction of North Korea says that the costs would be much, much greater than the integration of East and West Germany.

Not only assuming that a hot war would have serious consequences to the economy of South Korea.

[antimatter]

> Who is going to help them? China? SK?

Most likely? The US taxpayers.

[vkou]

Doubtful. If Iraq is any indication, US reconstruction money is as likely to be stolen by the contractors, as it is not.

[jerf]

"One factor to consider here is what happens if no conflict occurs?"

Another angle is the threat North Korea wields is not static. 20 years ago we were worried "What if NK starts shelling Seoul?" Now we're worried "What if NK nukes Seoul or maybe Japan?" We're either at or just a year or two away from "What if NK nukes Hawaii?" with rapid progress towards "What if NK nukes the United States?" Give it another twenty years and it'll be "What if NK launches all of its couple hundred nukes at once?" and "What if NK deploys its bioweapons?" or even "What if NK simply accidentally mishandles its bioweapons and something it is developing gets out into the world?"

I'm not advocating for any particular solution here, not least of which is because at least at the moment I haven't got any skin in this game... at least, for another year or two, until NK can indeed reach me with a nuke-tipped missile, and even then, the odds they'd pick where I live is very, very low.[1] I don't know exactly how to analyze this case in game theory. But I at least recognize there is an element of this setup where even though at any given moment the locally rational thing to do is not to attack or provoke North Korea, the globally rational thing to do is probably not to keep choosing that choice indefinitely. One way or another, eventually North Korea is going to have to offer the international community another choice, whether it likes it or not.

(My personal suspicion is that China really is moving to constrain them and we see a good chance of perhaps-surprising cooperation, even if a Kabuki show is put on about the details, because it was all fun and games for China when what NK has was artillery pointed at a foreign city they didn't much care about, or had some scary weapons pointed at them. Even a couple of small nukes that can't reach China's really important assets might not concern them. But unless North Korea's posture has 100% been a carefully calculated act by otherwise ruthlessly logical individuals, which I'd suggest is not where the evidence points us, an actual nuclear power North Korea that has dozens of missiles that can reach anywhere in the world becomes a true threat to China as well, not only directly, but in that it might give other regional powers Ideas about how to "more effectively" leverage their nuclear arsenals to extract concessions from China, which I'd expect NK to immediately move to do as their only refuge at this point would be in audacity. As the NK threat continues to ramp up they become a threat to even more actors. Even for the US, the NK has been more "thorn in our side" than actual threat.)

[1]: Though that probably doesn't apply to all readers here. If I were North Korea and I was looking for ways to hurt the US, Washington DC would be my target #1... but Silicon Valley would be on my very, very short list, as not only hurting the US financially, but also symbolically. Personally I think I'd put Hollywood above it, then maybe New York, but Silicon Valley makes a pretty plausible 4th, as a way of striking the industry where the US is arguably most clearly leading the world in one relatively small place. So, you know, this discussion is IMHO getting rapidly less theoretical than some of us may like.

[ethbro]

Per my understanding of game theory, games can be run for different amounts of time. Additional rounds just naturally balloon the possibility space. But your logic seems sound for "We play the NK game out over the next 30 years, making a decision every 5 years."

They've made technological progress. They will continue to make technological progress. Therefore, the status quo for 30 years leads to an untenable situation. And the options then are worse than the options now.

Also, NK's political system makes Iran look like Switzerland.

I agree that the Chinese are going to determine in a large way how this plays out. Since the US government seems to publicly be expressing a hard line, the Chinese are going to have to pick a side.

Which is probably what the assassination of Kim's half brother was all about: given that regime replacement with a moderate (who would agree to suspend development in exchange for guarantees of sovereignity) by the Chinese would have been the obvious first option.

My expectation is that the Chinese are going to attempt regime change with the US's tacit agreement. The US, Japan, and China all don't lose if a Chinese proxy is allowed to continue to exist there.

All other options end with a NK-controlled peninsula (unlikely, and unacceptable by China-suspicious regional powers) or a SK-controlled peninsula (unacceptable by China).

Not to mention China could use an outlet for their bloated construction industry. "We will rebuild North Korea for humanitarian reasons!" would obviously play well.

[vkou]

The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has made it clear to everyone what guarantees of sovereignty, in exchange for giving up nuclear weapons are worth.

Nothing.

[yongjik]

Not saying you're wrong, but the same argument was used to justify the "liberation" of Iraq.