North Korea’s boys’ toys are not a threat – but our reaction to them is
Big missiles and nuclear weapons do not topple states, conventional arms do. Their menace is political, not military
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/14/north-korea-boys-toys-threat-reaction
I have the same sort of complaint that this author does. People have an overinflated sense of the danger of ‘WMD’s. Even the biggest hydrogen bombs we have are popguns to a rather middlin asteroid/comet impact and we barely spend a few million a year looking out for them. Much like our nation obsesses about aircraft disasters yet doesn’t give a damn about the 35,000 people _killed_ (figure maimed to be at least 3x that, then add in all the people affected and you are probably north of a million and getting close to 1% of our nation, _each year_!) on our highways. Nuclear, chemical and/or biological weapons are not that challenging to someone who has studied science (which, naturally, means they are total voodoo to the US population of anti-science non-evolution believing morons), but interestingly, that same educated person also realizes that, much like the author attempts to explain, these weapons do nothing but act as a deterrent (or as terror weapons because ignorant clueless morons are easy to terrorize). They cannot do anything useful militarily, even the vaunted surrender of Japan came down to the actions of a single general who refused to overthrow the emperor (without the emperor issuing a surrender there would likely have been several _million_ more people (on both sides) dead (and 3-5x wounded and 10x more affected); that emperor is not given the accolades he deserves!).
Of course, since our ruling oligarchy really has everything to gain and nothing to lose by promulgating this asymmetric understanding of risk, don’t expect anyone to pay attention to this author (or my blog!).
