North Korea says it will stage nuke test

[SlowwHand]

A) Bull****

B) What have we "taken over" and held on to any land or resources?
Try never.

[Dis]

we're still holding onto Iraq.

And it has been 3 years since we bombed a country. it's been over 3 years since the Iraq war.

But speaking of... I think it's high time we bomb someone else. there's nothing good on tv right now.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Dis
I think we need to look at why these nations develop nukes. It seems pretty simple. They devlop nukes to prevent the United States from attacking them. It's defensive move on their part.

Would the United States have attacked Iraq if they had nukes? Unlikely. Same with Afghanistan.

I think these nations have the right to develop nukes. They have a right to defend themselves from american agression.

What scares me is the proliferation and the risk these things can get into the hands of terrorists. I'm just afraid someone will nuke my city because they think we are a bunch of sinners. I have never sinned. I can't find a woman to sin with.

But...the DPRK is not a country. It's a ticking time bomb. It's been kept alive for over a decade by a continuous influx of foreign aid, but the area is basically a sinkhole that wastes resources as quickly as we can pour them in. KJI with nukes just has one more means of extorting aid out of the rest of the world: the knowledge that, if we let the inevitable happen, he will have the means to hurt us before they eat him alive. Or, worse yet, the nukes could vanish into the absolute anarchic chaos as the country disintegrates.

One way or another, we'll be faced with two equally appalling options. We can continue to keep this disgrace of a state on life support and feel good knowing that we're subsidizing the world's most outrageous human rights violations and helping Kimmy avoid the consequences of his and his father's actions. Or we can refuse and watch millions of people die of starvation, along with whatever else happens when a country suddenly reverts to the dark ages. It has to end sometime, though, and the longer it continues the deeper in trouble we'll dig ourselves.

[Elok]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
B) What have we "taken over" and held on to any land or resources?
Try never.

Well, I'll let the history buffs correct you in detail, but at the very least that needs to be amended to "not too recently." We took this whole damned country by force, after all. Then there are cases such as the Philippines...

[GePap]

Hey sloww, try half of Mexico.

The point Dis made though is rather simple, nukes are a defensive weapon. You get them to make others afraid to attack you. DPRK is paranoid, and they believe, probably quite rightly, that if they have nukes that can hit Japan at least, the US would never try the whole "armed regime change" bit on them. They have plenty of incentives to build one, just like India and Pakistan and Israel and France and the UK and China and Russia, and the US had.

[Dis]

yep, he is paranoid enough to believe the U.S. will attack him (even if we have no intention of doing so).

The scary part is what will happen to the nukes once they are built. We have no way of knowing if he will sell them, or they they aren't guarded properly (especially problematic when the goverment collapses). Scary stuff.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
B) What have we "taken over" and held on to any land or resources?

Only half of the Pacific

[SlowwHand]

We have a base in the Phillipines, but it's not occupation.

Mexico is lucky Texas doesn't want them.

[Barnabas]

Yes, the right to owning slaves was too important for Texans (or at the least the anglo immigrants who moved there)

[GePap]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
We have a base in the Phillipines, but it's not occupation.

Mexico is lucky Texas doesn't want them.

So you agree you were wrong then about taking other people's land.

[SlowwHand]

For some reason I don't want to answer that.

[Elok]

IIRC, the Phillipines were a U.S. Territory until after WWII. We hit them with some rebellious rhetoric to encourage them to stand up to the Japanese, and after the war they started to feel somewhat rebellious towards us instead. Something like that.

[Darius871]

Hell, one could argue every inch of land west of the Appalachians has been "taken" by the U.S. (not just the Southwest), since the natives didn't exactly sign it all over. I can't think of any valid examples in the 20th century though, or the 21st for that matter.

[SlowwHand]

Injins don't count.

[thesilentone]

Compare the cowboys in the old wild west of america, with the mujihadeen in sudan of today...