World War 3

Well, North Korea has no allies aside from China, so no one stands to gain anything from their development of ballistic missiles. India has a positive relationship with the West, and a lukewarm (at best) relationship with China. It comes down to the fact that China and North Korea are terrible places run by terrible people, and India is a terrible place run by people who like us.

I seriously doubt that any of your foreign aid was used in their development of intermediate ballistic missile development. Typically foreign aid comes in material form or has specific restrictions for use, it's not just "lol hav sum $$".

Lets just nuke everything.

Ah. "Us." The language of Empire. Gotta love it (thanks a bunch, Victorians). I've personally got no beef with China or North Korea, and I don't think either of them have any particular desire to blow me up either. Terrible shmerrible, what they aren't is stupid. And that's all that matters. North Korea wants a small nuclear arsenal to act as a deterrant to replace their disproportionately huge army so they can actually start feeding their people properly again? I say let them. Maybe they'll actually start warming to the west a bit more if they actually feel secure.

Yeah, obviously I mean by proxy. Every food package we send them is another wad of cash they can spend on their defense budget instead of domestic consumption. At the very least they should be focusing on the fucking Maoist guerrillas roaming their countryside with Kalashnikovs, not their potential ability to kill a bunch of people hundreds of miles away.

At least in North Korea's case, I'd seriously doubt that claim. China's governing body is too large to be abjectly stupid, but North Korea is essentially a monarchy, and the people in power there have never been very much on the ball.

God, your anxiety about imperialism is strong enough to make you wish for more nuclear states? Even when the entire rest of the world has agreed that North Korea is the last country on this planet that needs them? And you seriously think that if North Korea gets a successful nuclear weapons program, that they'll just explode into prosperity? There's no reason to believe that any of their domestic policies would change.

No. A belligerent expansionist despotic regime that cements its authority with overwhelming military power will never feel secure.

If you take out the "despotic regime", it sounds like USA.

You might be able to argue that the US is belligerent, and frankly it would be difficult for it not to be as the global hegemon, but it's not expansionist. The US does not go to war for territory, and we don't actually have outstanding territorial claims, apart from like one island in Canada. The primary reason the US goes to war in this day and age is to maintain its geopolitical influence, and that does not qualify as expansionism in the least.

True true, it's not expansionist.

Oh come on. Really? First off I highly doubt the Kims themselves are where the real power lies in North Korea. They're probably not a whole lot more than just a popular dynasty that keeps the population in line through the nonsense that's constantly peddled about them. With a military that big and that central to the entire country's economy I would be incredibly surprised if the Chiefs of Staff weren't the ones calling the shots. Secondly, I fail to see how they're seriously what you'd call stupid. On the contrary they must have some real smarts to have kept their little hermit shithole running for so long, even managing to ride the fallout of the Soviet collapse, succeeding where their chief competitors for complete absurdity - Albania and Romania - both failed.

When you look back at history nuclear weapons have been far more effective at preventing wars than starting them. Even Stalin, who by the 1950s we can pretty much all agree was probably the most paranoid, mentally unstable head of state in the developed world, did not, upon achieving a significant nuclear arsenal, commence a campaign of nuclear holocaust with the west simply because he was a bit gone in the head. It's pretty silly to assume the opposite would be true of the somewhat more level headed North Korean leadership. Besides, who are they going to actually deploy these things against in an initial attack? South Korea? Not if they don't want the entire peninsula to be completely coated in radioactive fallout they won't. And don't give me any "herpderp but Norf korea are dumbass crazypants that don't care if all of korea is irradiated" because that's just bullshit. The whole idea that the leadership of places like North Korea are somehow completely cuckoo is practically just a poor rationalisation for maintaining garrisons in South Korea, thereby giving another reason to keep the US defence budget nice and high.

Look I'm just saying that if I were put in charge of North Korea tommorrow (and I wasn't going to unrealistically just dismantle the regime and surrender to the south), one of my top priorities would be to secure the development of some kind of limited nuclear deterrant since they'd be a far more effective and economically efficient alternative to having the entire country function as an armed camp like it has been for the last half a century. This is probably the world's only existing true command economy after all - every dollar that's spent on a bullet, tank or missile is a dollar that could potentially be spent directly on agriculture or light industry. And yes. I said deterrant. Sorry but the North Korean government is not composed of Marvel comicbook supervillains who all have ein grand masterplan to destroy all of ze vorld viz their mastery of ze atomik bomb (muahahaha). I wouldn't expect them to use them offensively for the reasons I've already outlined. Even the most incompetent village idiot can see that using nuclear weapons in a strike against the south would be a ridiculously stupid idea.

Pardon me, but back in 2003 "the rest of the world" was quite adamant that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. So I tend to take whatever "the rest of the world" has to say with a pinch of salt. Especially since up until 1991 "the rest of the world" was actually only about half of the world.

"Explode"? No. But it will give the opportunity to make some real changes domestically. And don't tell me they wouldn't because there simply isn't a choice. Nuclear deterrant or no nuclear deterrant the regime is going to have to do some real restructuring soon. The country's practically running on air at this point and it can't continue for much longer. You ever wonder why back in the day North Korea was actually more prosperous than the South for quite some time? It was because it had money coming in from the USSR. Now using the traditional "let's pretend North Korea are idiots" logic, they'd have spent every penny of that on defense - but they didn't. They spent it on industry, infrastructure, municipal development, rebuilding damage done by the war and agriculture. Ever since the late 80s they've been trying to maintain their cold war military budget but without any additional income simply because they're paranoid as fuck that they'll go the way of East Germany. Whether or not they're actually justified in that belief is a pretty murky topic, but the only important thing is that it's what the men in charge believe, and they're acting accordingly.

And expanionist? Really? Their list of countries they've invaded in their entire history stands at 1. Unless they've repeatedly invaded Japan or Russia in recent years and it just completely passed me by.

If my teenage years of foaming-at-the-mouth borderline sociopathic Stalinism taught me anything, it's that taking an alternate look at countries that most people dismiss as being tinpot nuthouses can be valuable. Sadly it's not a viewpoint that's shared by anyone outside of university professors who study North Korea and slightly gone in the head ultra leftists that declare anything unfavourable written about "the DPRK" to be "Imperialist Propaganda". Never mind the video and photographic evidence, eh?

Everyone else on the other hand makes like Aldo Raine and declares "they're the footsoldiers uv a freedom-hatin' mass murderin' maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed!" and gets sharpening their scalping knife at the first mention of any kind of trouble on the peninsula.

I think Tropico will start WW3.

El Presidente can be quite the leader sometimes..

Michelle Bauchman wins the 2012 election--->Stupid foreign policy=War with Iran--->Gas prices skyrocket again &Russia will be angry becouse of her actions(Like NATO and Lybia)--->Russia and the BRIC will put pressure on America and NATO--->High Tension+Bauchmann's stupidity=War between those nations.

Two things I'd like to point out.
1.) China and Russia are not allies. They do business with China, a little bit more business than us, and cooperate with them. But they are not allies. China has plenty of reason to want to go to war with them. Space or more resources is more likely. They simply have similar, I don't want to say enemies, but rather rivals. They have similar rivals (US and Europe) and that is the only reason they appear to support each other. Believe me, Russia would never support China and vice versa in any kind of war.
2.) Jingles is right, its wrong that the international community gets pissed at North Korea, and we don't care about India. India is just as likely to start a war with Pakistan as North Korea is with South Korea/Japan/US.

India is much less likely to launch a nuclear missile for the fact that their military could actually hold their own against Pakistan, and they would have much more foreign help. If North Korea were to go to war with South Korea, they would get massacred. Thus, seeing that their country is already gonna fall, I would not put it past the North Korean military leaders to launch a nuke, because they would die anyway.

What if Kim Jong Un becomes the next Erwin Rommel? o.0

Then suddenly North Korea will find itself led by a gentlemen rather than a stereotypical fat kid.

Enough with fantasy!

World war 3 will start because of the flaccid leadership we have in Washington right now. We do nothing but appease our enemies. Most of what the west does anymore is just talk and countries like Russia, China or Iran could care less what the UN has to say.

Yeeeeeaaaaah, FascistPatriot has spoken bitch!

I about half agree with this post.
The Chinese does buisness with Russia and that is how they can get resources. Beyond that, they have other countries that they can get materials from. Recall that China purchases large amounts of the iron and other steel-making materials from Australia.
China has the largest population in the 2nd or 3rd largest area. If they needed to expand (which they don't really need to do, they just need to de-centralize their cities and spread them out), they have better ways to do it rather than war. They could (as Russia and several other land neighbors already accuse them of) unofficially start allowing people to live just beyond the border. I know that Mongolia has this kind of thing, where Chinese citizens have set up small communities just beyond the border, slowly expanding China's border by the sheer bursting at the seams. Once a large enough loyal population has taken hold in a 'Democratic' country, well...

This is something I'd 'like', but there is the other half of the post.

Indeed, the US' hypocracy is showing.
I doubt that China and India will go to war any time soon though. The border dispute isn't heated enough to actually sever the growing trade (particularly through BRIC) and India is watching Pakistan more than China.

NOONE would help India if Pakistan attacked them. At least the US certainly wouldn't. We are technically allied to both of them. If, for some reason the US was preoccupied enough with something to completely ignore India and Pakistan, then I don't think they would be too scared to have a limited short range nuclear war. Especially if one of them was losing. Its more likely that Pakistan would fire first then India would fire back.

True enough. But I think that it wouldn't be too far fetched for the Chinese to attack Russia in a case similar to Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon, where China attacks because they find massive oil and mineral deposits in Siberia.

Clancy wrote that in a different time.
Not only was the thinking different, but the situation under which he wrote it was completely different.
The Chinese and the Russians may not have the buddy-buddy relationship that the US has with its allies, but they mutually benefit each other through buisness ventures.
Clancy simply doesn't like China. That book is a fine piece of propoganda, but it remains a piece of propoganda, warped by Clancy's opinion.