One of the big problems has long been that North-Korea has a large network of artillery within shelling distance of Seoul. Now they also have rockets and nukes and stuff, but even without those any serious threat to NK would come with devastating cost of civilian lives in South-Korea.
See e.g. [1], which estimates that "the DPRK could cause thousands of casualties in just a minute and more than 100,000 in an hour" and some of the case studies in that report have more than 200,000 in an hour. And all of that assumes only conventional HE rounds – no chemicals or nukes. And all of that is in the first hour alone: a full war would cost millions of lives (during the Korean war, South Korean casualties were about a million civilians and 250,000 soldiers).
You need to move carefully when you've got almost 6,000 pieces of artillery pointed at your head, never mind nukes, and the people in control of them seem rather unhinged.
I've seen people express this kind of "we should have just intervened" opinion before, and in principle I don't disagree, but it's really not that simple: both due to the strong risk of heavy civilian casualties, and the geopolitical impact with the USSR during the cold war (and to lesser degree, contemporary China and Russia – I can already see China invade Taiwan using "but you invaded NK!" as an excuse).
[1]: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA619-1.html
China has made it clear they aren't particularly thrilled with the idea of having someone not under their thumb next to their border as well. As a consequence of that... the "best" scenario would probably be China invading. But "best" is definitely in scare quotes as that could go VERY wrong very very quickly. I think the PRC is aware of that too. So unfortunately that means the DPRK will starve, because the realpolitik is such that solving the issue is just not a tenable solution for all the other parties.
On the other hand, the current costs of hostilities isn't free either as militaries don't pay for themselves; e.g. a 10% decrease in military spending for countries like South-Korea and Japan would save billions every year (right now, both are increasing spending).
I agree it's not a simple situation because there are 25 million mostly uneducated starving North-Koreans you've got to do something with, but in purely financial terms you're probably going to save money in the long run.
Part of the problem is that threatening North Korea plays into the hands of the Kims - it makes the "strongman leader" more attractive.
Invading Iraq and tearing Libya to pieces really didn't help.
I'll also point out that ROK and the US maintain 24/7 surveillance of NK depots and munitions storage areas (and pretty much everything else). NK could not attempt to mount such an operation without being detected. Unless they use their 100 year old stealth biplanes, then all bets are off.
It's just a single branch of military, quite useless if there is modern missile-based air defense in place.
The embattled regime could employ a scorched earth policy and will launch all the weapons they've got, resulting in millions of civilian deaths. That seems worse to me.
It's not like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, or even Putin's Russia.
If it wasn't for that Korea could be reunited and it will probably end up fairly well, similar to how the reunification of Germany ended up well.
Germany still has east-west integration problems.
I wonder why that's my first thought, rather than the citizens wondering "Well, the government is gone, let's build a collective to self-govern." -- I guess people would rather join a structured society somewhere else rather than try to build one themselves (probably out of nothing, in NK). Not to mention yeah, even if the current asshole is gone, the next asshole is probably busy setting up shop to resume the oppression.
Many good and normal and moral people would want to self organize and self govern and build something better from the ashes of a fallen country, the problem is that those good and honest people will be manipulated, tricked, and murdered by those who are more brutal and cunning than them.
Tragic, disappointing sure. I also happen to disagree that it is ignored or forgotten, this article just being the latest example.
On a purely logical level, we did what we could. But when people talk about other world events (WW2 for example) they’ll often wonder why the average person didn’t fight whatever horror was going on then.
Does it ignore the entire context of the situation, yeah. But it’s odd that I think we’re in that time now.
I’m being emotional because I have a cold, I’m in bed, reading something that made me sad. Take that with a grain of salt haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relief_of_Douglas_MacArthur#Nu...
Sidenote: I am not a MacArthur 'fan', but he was a very complex character
It might depend on the particular warhead, but this was not the case for Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
1. Not the utterly pointless, banal conflicts started by lies and personal vendettas that have already killed hundreds of thousands and millions of people, spilled over into neighbouring (and not so neighbouring) countries, and destabilized entire parts of the world?
2. If this is going to be among the worst of this century, you must have an incredibly optimistic outlook on what the next 80 years are going to look like!
Unfortunately, it's not as much ignoring as it is the few options available. If there is one country that can do something about it, that would be China - they currently prop the regime. But I wouldn't hold my breath that China, also one of the most immoral regimes in history, would care about what North Korea is doing as long as it keeps bothering the US.
Their real "torture" is western sanctions and exclusion from global trade. The reason for the regime to exist has never disappeared and will persist for as long as North Korea is being attacked. Everything about it being "crazy hermit kingdom" stems directly from the dominant political-economical institutions isolating North Korea and by extent all the individuals from the rest of the world.
There is no excuse for treating people like that for generations. Worse than that, this ends up serving as a self-fulfilling prophesy that allows propaganda state media like BBC to push its narratives.
Yeah, for sure people will suffer, but that's not their government who is being tyrannical - everyone is pretty much aware who specifically fuck with their livelihoods.
Even worse, there seem to be lots of people in the west who actually seem to think that this approach is doing something positive and it's ok to be completely fascist as long as it serves some glorious political purpose.