xchagalx
Thinking the Unthinkable
Halloween may be over ... but the threats to western civilization are as real today as sundown occuring this evening.
North Korea's Kim Il Jung is claiming his country to be a nuclear force to be respected. He hates America.
Iran is working to be so considered. Its leadership hates America.
A danger exists that terrorists will get such a weapon and use it against the U. S. The Islamic terrorists hate America.
We find ourselves over committed in Iraq, Afghanistan, South Korea, Bosnia with far too many boots on the ground in these and other places around the world.
We think of ourselves as the good guys. Our nation has spent the taxpayers' treasure in the billions and billions of dollars .. even at a time when a billion here and a billion there wasn't considered chump change. We are without any doubt whatsoever the most powerful nation that ever existed.
But for whatever reason, we appear paralyzed when threatened by pipsqueaks of diminuitive importance on the world stage.

What to do about it?

Frightening as they are, options are available - not inviting, but they provide alternatives. Most importantly, even the hint of consideration makes us instantly unpredictable.
For instance, USS PUEBLO still lays captive in Korean waters. It's a reminder to the world, if not to us, that our immediate past is replete with examples of our tissue-paper tiger stature. Let's suppose Kim Il Sung has been successful in developing THE bomb and a delivery system capable of reaching the United States.
The time is at hand to move on to the unthinkable:
Option 1: Launch a multiple head ICBM with one non-nuclear war head and the remainder dummies. Mission: take out Pueblo and splash those dummie warheads along the coast of North Korea. No advance warning and no follow-up explanation. Leave it to the world to digest its meaning. Crazy? Maybe .. or maybe not.
Option 2: Begin removing our troops post haste from South Korea. Again, no explanation. Leave the stewing and worry to the bad guys! Why are the Americans leaving after all these years? Crazy? No. It's time we changed our policy of using American lives as a shield in potentially impossible circumstances. And our signal would be crystal clear. Our power will consist of brutal technology and not the lives of 30,000 American men and women of our armed forces.
Option 3: Immediately leak plans to provide Japan a limited nuclear capability to protect themselves. Crazy? Why? This is a reality the Russians and Chinese dread .. and given history, both have every reason to dread any such possibility.
Option 4: At a point when all hope of any diplomatic success is gone, and other nations fail to join in stopping North Korea and/or Iran from threatening the world, we resort to our technical advantage. We take out the offensive missile facilities as well as those involved in the production of nuclear weapons, first with conventional weaponry and, as a last resort limited nukes. This final option need not be a precursor to total war. Why?
Put yourself in Beijing and Moscow as the leadership of those nations. Are you willing to sacrifice everything for Kim Il Jong, a miniaturized madman? Or the Iranian clerics whose direction is a threat to China and Russia.
But these options are all crazy. The U. S. doesn't do such things. Doing such would be unthinkable.
Most probably! Yet even thinking about any one of these alternatives involves reawakening a deterrent value which has diminished to the point of non-existence.
In a strategic sense, the United States must not allow itself to remain taken for granted. Vietnam proved vacuous a policy by which we told the world what we were going to do. And, at the same time, telling an enemy what we weren't going to do forged an iron-clad formula for defeat.