How nuclear war could unfold

[struggle4progress]

By Jeffrey Lewis
Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey

MARCH 2019 ... nobody grasped how quickly accidental violence could take on its own urgent logic ... When a South Korean airliner strayed into North Korean airspace, a Northern air defense crew .. mistook it for an American bomber. The crew fired a surface-to-air missile .. killing all 250 .. on board ... Within hours, Moon ordered South Korean missile units to strike the air defense battery, as well as select leadership targets throughout North Korea ... But .. surviving members of the Moon administration insist that things would have been fine had President Trump not picked up his smartphone: "LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE AROUND MUCH LONGER!" It was an idle Twitter threat — Trump hadn't yet been briefed about the missile strike, and it hadn't yet been discussed on “Fox & Friends.” But how would Kim Jong Un know that? ... And so, facing what he believed was a massive American military invasion, Kim gave the order ... Many North Korean missiles did miss their targets in South Korea and Japan ... But ... the bombs that fell off target still inflicted massive damage on urban areas ... Kim had misread the American mood ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/this-is-how-nuclear-war-with-north-korea-would-unfold/2017/12/08/4e298a28-db07-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html?utm_term=.be2b9335c110

[struggle4progress]

1. Heading Toward Nuclear War with North Korea? (Nat'l Review)

GEORGE WILL
December 9, 2017 8:00 PM

... Today .. North Korea's nuclear bellicosity coincides with the incontinent tweeting, rhetorical taunts, and other evidence of the frivolity and instability of the 13th president of the nuclear era. His almost daily descents from the previous day’s unprecedentedly bad behavior are prompting urgent thinking about the constitutional allocation of war responsibilities, and especially about authority to use U.S. nuclear weapons ...

... as a practical matter .. Trump can unleash "fire and fury"” without .. the consent of, or even consulting, Congress .. A long train of precedents tends to legitimate — although not justify — practices, and this nation has engaged in many wars since it last declared war, on June 5, 1942 ... Over many decades, Congress has become .. a bystander ...

A U.S. war of choice against North Korea would not be a preemptive war launched to forestall an imminent attack ...

It would be interesting to hear the president distinguish a preventive war against North Korea from a war of aggression. The first two counts in the indictments at the 1946 Nuremberg trials concerned waging "aggressive war."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454489/donald-trump-north-korea-war-will-his-instability-lead-nuclear-war

[roamer65]

2. I think WW3 will start in the Middle East first, then spread to Korea.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/war-middle-east-1.4407876

Dump may have lit the fuse by his boneheaded move on Jerusalem.

[spanone]

3. trump makes the possibility all too real