Alex WellersteinVerified account

But once their technology passes a point, arguably already reached but getting worse, it will not be worth it to hold them accountable for

Anything short of using nuclear arms. They say remove sanctions or we nuke LA, what then? The passive route delays the problem w/o solving.

Deterrence works both ways. We can't bluff them, they can't bluff us. Nuclear blackmail has never worked.

To put it another way: DPRK is never going to say, "remove sanctions or we'll do something that will surely get us killed."

If you want to have a realistic deterrence-question, ask, what happens if DPRK slowly moves across southern border?

The answer is, we'd have a crisis and have to deal with it. Such is how things go. But that's more realistic than nuclear blackmail fiction.

Blackmail is simplistic hyperbole but it illustrates a point as much as DPRK trying to sneak across the DMZ. Their capability only gets

Stronger, and short of literal divine intervention with a revolution there's no reason DPRK will stop its pattern of belligerence. I can't