Saber-rattling from the Far East... again.

Really, I was beginning to wonder if we shouldn't just ignore Kim-Jong-whoever's empty threats and just think of him as an endless source of entertainment.  Our Defense Department doesn't think so, however.

Over the past few weeks, North Korea has been endlessly throwing out what I thought was meaningless rhetoric, and quite frankly, I still do.  One of their recent propaganda videos showed a North Korean citizen (Citizen?  Subject might be a better term.) dreaming of a nuclear strike on New York City.  Humorously, being apparently at a loss for material, they used a scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 in said video.  Lately, Glorious Leader (or whatever they call him) Kim Jong Un has been outright threatening war with the United States.

Here's the problem I have with getting freaked out.  They don't have the missile technology to reach the U.S.; even if they did, it'd get shot down quickly.  However, the government has decided to add a bunch of new missile defense sites anyway.  It is my belief that, if North Korea genuinely wanted to attack us, it would not be with a conventional ballistic missile.  Instead, I suspect that it would be a much more underhanded action, such as "losing" a warhead, which then conveniently falls into the hands of terrorists who want to blow stuff up; this would of course completely negate the missile defenses.  Even still, that would be unbelievably hard to pull off, given that sneaking in a nuclear bomb would require getting passed an ungodly number of Federal and state agencies, all of whom are desperate to justify their existence.

What we do know, however, is that South Korea is not nearly as invulnerable.  Seoul is positioned within easy range of conventional artillery positioned just above the border, and those nuclear missiles?  They have a much greater chance of making it a little way south than across the Pacific Ocean.  Now, the U.S. still has troops in South Korea, so attacking it would be, essentially, a declaration of war on the United States.  Given, however, that Kim Jong appears to be somewhat unstable, it's not hard to imagine him assaulting South Korea and killing millions before he got squashed.  Don't get me wrong: I'm a non-interventionist for the most part, and I think that South Korea, which has a much stronger economy and far more advanced weapons than its neighbor, could handle itself in a fight.  Still, that's a whole lot of dead people, and honestly, I'm not thinking that it's us that need to worry about Commie missiles.